Last week, I met up with an old friend of mine who used to be a technical recruiter. When I whined to her about how lame, unaccomplished and jealous I feel when I read other people’s LinkedIn profiles, she rolled her eyes and scoffed at me. As a recruiter, she has seen plenty of people exaggerate and out right lie on their profiles. She has developed a finely tuned BS detector and can suss someone out within 5 minutes of a phone screen. “Don’t believe everything you read,” she told me. “Most of it is crap.” I immediately felt better about myself. At least I don’t lie on my resume, and I gave myself a pat on my back for having some integrity.
Every one of us chooses a persona we project in public and social media. Comparing ourselves to others is an exercise in futility as people share their greatest hits and omit their embarrassing failures. We all have our virtues and flaws. We have successes and failures. For the most part, people publicly elevate the good and privately bury the bad. You will never win at this comparison game because you are measuring yourself against a false truth.
To find true happiness, we have to find success on our own terms. This mistaken notion that happiness comes with professional or financial success leads people astray, chasing goals that result in disappointment if they are ever achieved. At the end of they day, all I really care about is my family and friends. I surround myself with people who love me for who I am and forgive me when I am careless with their feelings. My primary goal in life is to be the best mother, wife, sister, daughter and friend to these people. I am proud to say I am getting better at this every day, and that to me is success.