Why comparing yourself to others can be so damaging
What really happens when a student measures themselves against someone else.
There was a fourteen-year-old boy in my lessons, two years in, and he was genuinely progressing. Better timing, more feel for dynamics, he was starting to hear when something worked and when it didn’t. One day he said: my friend has played a year less than me and he can already play the drum solo from that one band. He didn’t sound jealous. More like someone who had reached a conclusion about himself that he’d been sitting with for a while.
I asked him what he thought that meant.
He shrugged. That I apparently have less aptitude.
What strikes me about that moment is how quietly comparison works. It hadn’t blocked him in the lesson. He just kept playing. But somewhere it had created a story, and that story was: I’m not good enough. And he had been carrying that story to himself for a while.
Comparison is one of the most human things there is. We’re wired for it — we measure ourselves against others to know where we stand. But learning music is a domain where that instinct backfires badly, because the routes can differ so radically from one another. One student starts with a rock-solid sense of rhythm but has never learned structure. Another has spent years on classical piano and gets stuck when it comes to improvisation. A third grew up in a musical household and has a thousand hours of listening experience that doesn’t show up as any visible skill.
That friend with the drum solo had probably had his own invisible head start. A YouTube obsession. A brother who plays drums. Hours in his bedroom practising something specific because he had to nail it. But my student only saw the gap between them, not the path his friend had walked.
The problem with comparison is that it moves the goalposts. From your own growth to someone else’s achievement. And that goalpost is moving, always just out of reach, because there is always someone who does something faster, better, or more impressively.
I’ve started to recognise that pattern in adults too. A forty-year-old beginner who watches a YouTube video of a teenager playing jazz chords flawlessly and then apologises for his own progress in the next lesson. A student who hears someone her own age play at a workshop and then spends three weeks questioning whether she should carry on.
The comparison says nothing about that student herself. But the feeling that goes with it — inadequacy, something close to shame — is entirely real.
In those moments I try not to reason the comparison away. That doesn’t work. Saying “you’re doing well too” or “it’s a different journey” feels like a plaster. The student knows I’m trying to be kind.
What I prefer to do is bring the conversation back to their own track. Do you remember how you struggled with that transition a year ago? What can you do now that you couldn’t do then? Those are real questions, with real answers. And those answers are about the student themselves, not about the average of everyone else.
Sometimes it helps to name the comparison explicitly — not as a mistake but as an understandable mechanism with a side effect. Comparison gives you a position relative to someone else, but it gives you no information about your own direction. It’s a compass that always points somewhere else.
What I’ve also come to see over the years is that students who compare a lot often have very little sense of their own growth. They have no reference point for themselves. They struggle to say what has changed in their playing over the past three months. And without that reference, the outside world is the only thing to hold onto.
That is something I can directly influence as a teacher — not through motivational speeches but by helping students see their own progress. Listening back to a recording from six months ago. A passage that now flows easily while three months ago it was a stumbling block. Small, concrete evidence that something is moving.
That fourteen-year-old never learned the drum solo. He went in a different direction, more towards rhythm and texture than technical showpieces. I think he became a better drummer because of it, even though that year he felt like he was falling behind.
But I do wonder what would have happened if he had carried that feeling longer without us ever talking about it. Whether at some point he would simply have stopped, with a reason he couldn’t quite explain to himself.
How many of your students are walking around with a comparison in their head that nobody has ever brought up?
Comparison moves the goalpost from your own growth to someone else's achievement. And that goalpost you can never reach.