There is a common saying that "comparison is the thief of joy," and this can be true for creativity as well. When you focus too much on comparing your own work or ideas to others, it can stifle your creativity and limit your ability to think outside of the box.
Here are a few reasons why comparison can stifle your creativity:
It can create self-doubt: When you constantly compare your work to others, it can make you doubt your own abilities and feel like your ideas are not good enough. This can cause you to second-guess yourself and be less willing to take risks and try new things.
It can limit your perspective: When you focus too much on what others are doing, it can limit your perspective and prevent you from seeing things in a new or different way. Creativity often requires looking at things from a fresh perspective and venturing outside of your normal thought patterns, but comparison can make it harder to do that.
It can stultify your innovation: When you are constantly comparing your work to others, it can be difficult to come up with truly innovative ideas. Instead, you may be more likely to simply mimic what others have done before. This can limit your ability to truly innovate and create something new and unique.
Overall, while it can be helpful to look to others for inspiration, focusing too much on comparison can be detrimental to your own creativity. To foster creativity, it's important to focus on your own ideas and perspective and allow yourself the freedom to think and explore a range of ideas without worrying about how your work compares to others.
Generally when we compare ourselves with others in any arena, this can come from a lack of self worth, feeling we are not good enough, our standard will never be high enough and so on.
Instead of judging the work on its own merits and trusting our intuition we get caught up in the good opinion of others - or 'GOOP' as Peter Sage, ( Author of 'The Inside Track), refers too it.
