You're Special Too, Stop Comparing Yourself to Others!

Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another. - Marquis de Condorcet

Terkadang kita sering tidak puas dengan apa yang sudah kita miliki atau yang sudah kita capai. Kita selalu ingin lebih, lebih, dan lebih. Selain ingin lebih. Kita juga sering kali tidak puas dengan diri sendiri dan selalu berusaha dan berharap menjadi orang lain, yang menurut kita “lebih” dari kita. Kita membandingkan dengan yang lain, membandingkan apa yang kita punya dan apa yang tidak.

Padahal, apakah dengan membandingkan kelebihan/ apa yang mereka punya dengan kekurangan/ apa yang kita tidak punya, we’d size up or it’d make us feel good? Nope! It’s a sure-fire recipe for a drop in self-confidence and for unhappiness. Lalu bagaimana kalau kita mulai membandingkan dan iri dengan yang lain?

Break that habit and try to be aware of when you start comparing yourself to others … once you’ve developed this awareness, try this trick: stop yourself. Tell yourself, “Stop that!” And then start thinking about all the things you DO have, the things you love, the people you have, the blessings that life has given you. Make this a regular practice, and you’ll start to be happier with your life.

Di bawah ini ada beberapa tips yang berguna saat kita mulai membandingkan dan iri dengan yang lain, semoga bermanfaat :)

• Awareness. Kebanyakan dari kita melakukan perbandingan sosial tanpa menyadari kita sedang melakukannya. Itu wajar saya kira. So the solution is to become conscious — bring these thoughts to the forefront of your consciousness by being on the lookout for them. If you focus on these thoughts for a few days, it gets much easier with practice, and soon it’ll be hard not to notice.
• Stop yourself. Jika kamu sudah sadar sedang melakukan perbandingan ini, give yourself a pause. Don’t berate yourself or feel bad — just acknowledge the thought, and gently change focus.
• Count your blessings. A better focus is on what you do have, on what you are already blessed with. Hitung apa yang kamu miliki BUKAN yang tidak! Think about how lucky you are to have what you have, to have the people in your life who care about you, to be alive at all.
• Focus on your strengths. Daripada melihat kelemahanmu, lebih baik tanyakan pada dirimu apa kekuatanmu. Celebrate them! Be proud of them. Don’t brag, but feel good about them and work on using them to your best advantage.
• Be OK with imperfection. Tak ada yang sempurna di dunia ini, kita semua tahu itu, but emotionally we seem to feel bad when we don’t reach perfection. You aren’t perfect and you never will be. I certainly am not, and I’ve learned to be OK with that. Sure, keep trying to improve, but don’t think you’ll ever be the “perfect person”. If you look at it in a different way, that imperfection is what makes you who you are, you already are perfect.
• Don’t knock others down. Kadang kita mencoba mengkritik orang lain untuk membuat kita terlihat atau merasa lebih baik. Membuat seseorang down demi keuntunganmu adalah destruktif. It forms an enemy when you could be forming a friend. In the end, that hurts you as well. Instead, try to support others in their success — that will lead to more success on your part.
• Focus on the journey. Don’t focus on how you rank in comparison to others — Hidup bukanlah kompetisi. It’s a journey. We are all on a journey, to find something, to become something, to learn, to create. That journey has nothing to do with how well other people are doing, or what they have. It has everything to do with what we want to do, and where we want to go. That’s all you need to worry about.
• Learn to love enough. Jika kamu selalu ingin apa yang orang lain miliki, kamu tidak akan pernah merasa puas. That’s an endless cycle, dan tidak akan membawa kebahagiaan. Tidak peduli berapa banyak baju yang kamu beli, tidak peduli berapa banyak rumah yang kamu miliki, tidak peduli berapa banyak mobil mewah yang kamu dapat… Kamu tidak akan pernah merasa cukup. Sebaiknya belajarlah untuk menyadari bahwa apa yang kamu miliki itu sudah cukup. If you have shelter over your head, food on the table, clothes on your back, and people who love you, you are blessed. You have enough. Anything you have over and above that is more than enough. Be good with that, and you’ll find contentment.

To love is to stop comparing. - Bernard Grasset

Where Will You Be Five Years From Today?

5 Years.
260 weeks.
1,825 days.
2,333,000 minutes.
It’s your time.
It’s your life.
What will you do with it?
What could you do with it?
In 5 years …
Christopher Columbus discovered a new world.
Michelangelo completed the Sistine Chapel.
Dian Fossey saved the lives of hundreds of mountain gorillas.
What about you?
This is your one and only life.
And you don’t want to miss it.
When was the last time you did something for the first time?
Go where you’ve never been.
What are you passionate about?
FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS — they know the way.
What will you do with your talents?
Make the world better?
You can.
Live your life on purpose.
Get involved.
Get inspired.
Make every moment count.
The next 5 years can be the very best 5 years of your life!
or just another 5 years.
What is life for?
It is for you.
Where will you be 5 years from today?

Jangan Lupakan Teman Lama Kalau Kamu Sudah Punya Teman Baru

Make new friends, but keep the old;

Those are silver, these are gold.

New-made friendships, like new wine,

Age will mellow and refine.

Friendships that have stood the test -

Time and change – are surely best;

Brow may wrinkle, hair grow gray,

Friendship never knows decay.

For ‘mid old friends, tried and true,

Once more we our youth renew.

But old friends, alas! may die,

New friends must their place supply.

Cherish friendship in your breast -

New is good, but old is best;

Make new friends, but keep the old;

Those are silver, these are gold.

by Joseph Parry

Ketika kita bertambah lebih tua dan hidup terus berjalan, orang terus-menerus masuk ke dalam hidup kita. Ketika kita pergi ke sekolah, memulai pekerjaan baru atau menikmati waktu luang, we’re making friends all the time. Kadang-kadang bisa rumit menjaga teman-teman lama ketika menemukan yang baru, but there are ways to hold on to the few true friends while you memorize those new names and faces.

Allow Yourself to Make New Friends

Memulai pekerjaan baru, pergi ke sekolah baru atau pindah ke tempat baru akan menciptakan banyak kesempatan bagi kita untuk bertemu orang baru dan berteman. Enjoy these opportunities and make great friends by not limiting yourself to your old buddies.

Create a Balance

Yup! Buat keseimbangan. Sah-sah saja kita punya teman baru tapi yang lama juga jangan dilupakan ya! Do not forget about your old friends! Your friends you have that history with… that connection with. Jangan gara-gara kita sudah menemukan teman baru yang “gue banget” lalu melupakan yang lama, yah paling tidak ingat teman yang punya bond atau ikatan dengan kita, atau deep history together. Kata Oscar Wilde, “Even though we’ve changed and we’re all finding our own place in the world, we all know that when the tears fall or the smile spreads across our face, we’ll come to each other because no matter where this crazy world takes us, nothing will ever change so much to the point where we’re not all still friends.”

Stay connected

Cara terbaik untuk menjaga teman-teman lama simply by staying in touch, dengan tetap berhubungan, paling tidak lewat SMS, facebook, twitter, dll. Your old friends know you the best and have shared many memories with you, so tell them all about your new experiences.  

Making new friends is part of everyone’s life journey, but make sure you hold onto the people who have been along for the ride for a long time. Old friends and new friends are equally important, and keeping both close to you may be easier than you’d expect.

Maybe You're Gone - Sondre Lerche

You have been waiting all your life
You use your patience to stay fine
Time moves on as you prepare
to tell yourself be reasonable

Then come the times you can't foresee
you cannot leave, you can't release
to keep you far from those dreams
Ignoring the right times
Oh, waiting was my life

For now it's too late
for you may not wait
and things that I have yet to know
vanish before they're complete

I may turn around
but as for now, it's just not safe
Maybe you'll wait for me
Maybe you're gone

You've been preparing all your life
You've had some trouble getting it right
And you try to tell yourself it
may work, as it should

But something good can do much harm
The good may kill for your embrace
to keep you far from those dreams
you know you cannot dream
I'm stuck for now, it seems

For now it's too late
for you may not wait
and things that I have yet to know
vanish before they're complete

I may turn around
but as for now, it's just not safe
Maybe you'll wait for me
Maybe you're gone

How we succeed by failing

 By the time Steve Jobs’s Wikipedia page had been adjusted to past tense, eulogists had added a footnote to his biography of success. Failure.

Jobs, though wildly successful, also failed often and badly. Therein, we note, lies perhaps the larger lesson of his life: Sometimes you have to fail to succeed.

The truth is, you usually have to fail to succeed. No one emerges at the top. Even those born lucky eventually get a turn on the wheel of misfortune. Anyone with a résumé of accomplishments also has a résumé of failures, humiliations and setbacks. Jobs was fired by the company he co-founded. Yet it was during this period of exile that he picked up a little computer graphics company later called Pixar Animation Studios, the sale of which made him a billionaire.

This is to say, to fail is human. To resurrect oneself is an act of courage.

Jobs himself recognized his failures in a now-famous 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. He recalled sleeping on the floors of friends’ dorm rooms and walking seven miles to a Hare Krishna temple for his one good meal of the week. One needn’t make an appointment with the Genius Bar to glean the moral of this story.

Fear of failure isn’t only an adult concern. From an early age, we are plagued with anxiety about performance. This seems a natural-enough evolutionary development. The strong and savvy survive (and get the girl). The less accomplished eat scraps and enjoy the company of human leftovers. “Losers,” we call them. So habitual is our attention to failure that we even have a word — or at least the Germans do — for enjoying others’: schadenfreude.

What possibly could make us take pleasure in another’s failure? Simple. We love the company.

A history of human failure would make for a long and interesting read, yet we prefer books about success. We thrill at the end-zone victory dance, applaud the extra point, admire the perfect 10. In literature, what is redemption but recovery from human failing? We love no one more than the man or woman who says I made a mistake, I’m sorry, please forgive me. Forgive? We want to hoist the penitent on our shoulders.

An entire lexicon of cliches has evolved around the idea of failure and recovery. It’s not the thing attained that matters; it’s the journey that gives us life. The act of creation — the struggle — far exceeds the pleasure of the thing created. Unless, of course, it’s an Apple iPhone 4S. BlackBerry? Not so much.

Recent acknowledgment of the power of failure, inspired by Jobs’s too-soon demise, provides a welcome spiritual uplift for stressed-out adults. But we’re missing an even more important morality tale that has profound consequences for our nation’s future. Our obsession with success and our fear of failure has trickled down to ever-younger humans, our children, at great cost not only to their psychological well-being but also, ultimately, to our ability to compete in the global marketplace.

We’re so afraid that our kids won’t measure up that we drive them crazy with overbooked schedules and expectations and then create a sense of entitlement by insisting on assigning blame elsewhere when their performance is lackluster. Sideline parents, first cousins to back-seat drivers, who challenge coaches, teachers and umpires on behalf of their children are a relatively new development that can’t be considered positive. When I wrote recently about the failure (there’s that word again) of colleges to teach core curricula that engender critical thinking skills, dozens of professors wrote to complain of students who aren’t willing to work hard (or show up) yet still expect good grades. Even in college, they said, parents pester professors for better marks for their little darlings.

In another famous commencement address, J.K. Rowling’s to Harvard in 2008, the “Harry Potter” author eulogized her own valuable failures. “Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations,” she said. “Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way.”

If we agree that wisdom, confidence and a better Apple are gifts of failure, then why are we so afraid to allow our children to experience it? In a culture where failure is not well-enough understood as necessary to growth — and accomplishment is diminished by a code of equal outcomes that enshrines entitlement — then no one gets wiser or better. And a nation populated by such people may not survive.

Tulisan ini ditulis oleh Kathleen Parker  (kathleenparker@washpost.com) dan saya ambil dari Washington Post