The theme for this week is: The Comparison Trap.

Comparing yourself to others is natural, and is something we do all the time. The problem with comparing ourselves to others is that it leads to one of two miserable places: “pride or envy. You’re always going to either find somebody who’s doing a better job than you, and you get full of envy, or you’re going to find that you’re doing a better job than somebody, and you get full of pride.” That’s according to Rick Warren, the author of The Purpose Driven Life, who first introduced me to the concept of the Comparison Trap many years ago.

During the holidays, I saw a car commercial on TV that really brought this into focus for me. You’ve probably seen the car commercials where the husband brings home a new car for his wife for Christmas. It’s got that giant, obnoxious red bow on top...you know what I’m talking about.

Well this particular car commercial featured a husband who brought home not one, but 2 new cars for Christmas - a giant truck and a brand new SUV! Now he and his wife were going to have to battle it out, because it turns out they both wanted the truck.

Is this the new normal? Who can just drop over 100,000 on 2 new cars for Christmas!? Very few people, actually, but this commercial and hundreds of others like it send us messages every day that we can’t just buy new socks or a bottle of whiskey for our significant other for Christmas. We need to buy 2 brand frickin new cars!

Marketing messages certainly influence our tendency as humans to compare ourselves to others. The trick is building more immunity to those messages to protect our wallets and help us actually build and maintain financial security, which last I checked, dropping 6 figures on Christmas presents doesn’t help with.

So just for today, pay attention to the marketing messages that inspire pride or envy. Marketers know that these are powerful emotions and they know how to use them to get you to buy stuff. So practice awareness of the marketing messages you hear today, and note which ones lead you to compare yourself to others.

That’s it for today! Thanks for listening. Tomorrow we’re going to talk about the antidote for the comparison trap.

My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the One Minute Retirement Tip.

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