My #1 Key to Happiness

Comparison is the thief of happiness! Comparison and happiness cannot coexist! We are all guilty of comparing our lives to the lives of others. We compare how much financial success, family, status, joy we have compared to others… But there is ANOTHER type of comparison that is INSIDIOUS and robbing you of your happiness. This comparison is when we compare our current life to the life we had in the past! If you want to have an unhappy relationship, let me tell you how to have it...... Compare it to your previous relationship! If you want to be unhappy with your fitness, compare your current body at 45 to your body when you were fit at 18! This type of COMPARISON, when you compare your current state to a previous state, is the #1 thing holding you BACK from experiencing happiness! It is actually the PATHWAY to UNhappiness! If you can remove yourself from comparing your life, your experiences, your health, your finances, your relationships, your business to a previous time in your life, you will unlock the door to experience an abundance of HAPPINESS! In this episode, I'm teaching you the practical steps on how to STOP the comparison game and START using comparison as a WEAPON to achieve! When used properly, comparison can be FUEL to your FIRE! It can be the catalyst that propels you into the next best version of yourself! RIGHT NOW learn how to achieve MORE HAPPINESS and to use comparison as a weapon for change! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ed Mylett?

  I hear so many small business owners say the exact same thing. They just never have enough time in the day. Well, I measure time differently. I've compressed, condensed, heck, I've bent time. My first day is 6:00 a.m. to noon. My second day starts at noon and goes till 6:00 p.m. And my third day, 6:00 p.m. to midnight. I now get 21 days a week. Stack that up over a month, over a year, over five years, and my life's completely different than it would have been otherwise. And if you want to win as an entrepreneur, you have to compress your time too. And you definitely can't afford to waste it. Waiting weeks on a big bank for capital? Your best bet's to work with my friends at Cardiff. They know how to compress time for entrepreneurs. They get your business approved in minutes and funded the very same day. They're America's favorite small business lender, and for good reason.

• 0:45Ed Mylett?

  Over 20 years in business, over $12 billion deployed to small business across America. Stop letting bank delays slow down your momentum. Head to cardiff.co/ed. That's cardiff.co/ed. Cardiff.co. Real growth, fast funding. Cardiff. Borrow better.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company, for me, of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 1:38Speaker 03

  This is the Ed Mylett Show.

• 1:47Ed Mylett?

  Welcome back to Max Out, everybody. I'm Ed Mylett. And today's program, I think, is going to go a long way to help you find more happiness and more leverage to go become successful simultaneously. So we're going to talk today about comparison and how it affects our happiness level and how it can affect our drive level. Comparison in every area of our life can either be used as a weapon to create complete unhappiness in our life, or it can be utilized as a catalyst to help us succeed at the highest of levels. I want you to remember something. Comparison is the pathway to unhappiness. I'm telling you that in every area of your life where you find unhappiness, you will find comparison. In fact, the antithesis to that is also true. When there is no comparison... You cannot create unhappiness in your life.

• 2:32Ed Mylett?

  That's a pretty bold and powerful statement, but it's true. We only feel unhappy in our lives when we compare something to maybe something in our life that was a different time. Maybe perhaps when we were wealthier, or in a different relationship, or we were healthier on some level. Comparing our current conditions to previous ones, that comparison is what creates the unhappiness. It's actually not the condition itself. Or perhaps you're in a relationship where you compare it to a previous relationship you had, and how they treated or how you felt at that time. Perhaps you compare this time in your life just to a simply a different time. And that comparison will always create unhappiness in your life. If you can remove yourself from comparing both yourself to a previous time in your life, a previous condition, a previous situation, or even comparing yourself to other people in your life.

• 3:17Ed Mylett?

  This is a recipe and a formula for unhappiness. Every single time in your life where you're experiencing unhappiness, you are doing a comparison to something. It's the contradiction between your current situation, current relationship, current body, current finances, current anything, and something exterior. Either a previous time in your life, a previous person in your life, or you comparing yours to someone else's. It is an insidious disease that so many people in society suffer from today, particularly because of the advent of social media. We watch someone's video of what they're doing on a Friday night, and it's not what they're doing that makes us unhappy. It's comparing what they're doing to what we're doing that makes us unhappy. It's seeing people laughing and jovial,

• 4:00Ed Mylett?

  or jet setting, or seeming to be having a great time, compared to what we're doing, and that creates unhappiness. It's not the success of people you know that's making you unhappy. It's your comparing your situation to the success they're having that creates unhappiness in your life. So for those of you that are struggling and saying, you know, one of the things I suffer from is I'm just not very happy very often. I can tell you that that presence... Of unhappiness, you will always link to a comparison of some sort, either in your own life or in other people's lives. And just being aware of that fact and stopping the comparison, embracing this moment, embracing this time, knowing that you can't go back to that previous time, knowing that you can't be in somebody else's life. You're not gonna have that other body right now.

• 4:45Ed Mylett?

  And so if you're looking to be happier, I can promise you, the number one key that I would give you is to stop the comparison game. You'd say, "Well, that's not completely true." I mean, what if someone passes away? That makes me unhappy. There's no comparison there. Let's take the most extreme example. Or when someone's sick in my family, uh, you know, someone in my family's got a really bad illness. Uh, that makes me unhappy. That's not a comparison. In fact, it is. The fact of the matter is that when someone gets sick in your family or passes away, what you do in your mind is you compare it to when they were healthy. So that comparison of "I wish they were healthier again", that is a comparison between the previous situation and the current condition. If someone passes away, it's comparing the time that you had them.

• 5:29Ed Mylett?

  That's why people say, "If I could just have one more moment with them." "If I could just have another conversation." It's comparing it to when you had the moment. It's comparing it to when you had the conversation. And so those are extreme examples. But if we reduce it all the way down to anything right now in your life that you say, "It brings me unhappiness." There's no joy there. There's a comparison happening that's not serving you. It's so important to take a look at it because I really believe most people think, and I've covered this before from a different angle, that if I can just change my exterior circumstances, I will be happier. And that's because they're comparing their current circumstances to someone else. That'd be like somebody sitting in their home who's unhappy, in their current home, and saying, "What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna rearrange the house, and then I'll be happier."

• 6:13Ed Mylett?

  And so they rearrange the exterior furniture, the exterior conditions of the house. And then when they sit back down, they're still unhappy. So they go, "Okay, what I'll do is I'll rearrange the exterior of the house again," or the interior of it, and they fix it again, and they're still unhappy. The reason that's so important is when you accept the fact that it's not the external conditions of your life that create happiness. What creates happiness in our life is realizing that we are not our possessions. We are not our titles, we are not our recognition, we are not our accolades, we are not our popularity. That we're perfect as we are. We're perfect as we are. Then we begin to accept ourselves and love ourselves as we are, is when we find true happiness.

• 6:55Ed Mylett?

  But comparing yourself to another time where maybe you had more recognition, you had a better title, you had more influence, will always lead you to a pathway of unhappiness. Now, I'm not talking about self-love in the sense that you just accept everything in your life and you sit around. What I'm suggesting to you is, happiness and success are often two different things. Happiness comes from acceptance. Happiness comes from surrender and loving ourselves as we are. Because if we think we're just gonna rearrange the furniture and then we're happier, we still live in the house that is us. We are still housed, our souls, our hearts and our minds are still housed in the same home, which is our body. And if we can't begin to love it without the comparison of some change,

• 7:40Ed Mylett?

  we're never going to love it. We will always be trying to exchange the furniture of our life. We'll always be trying to change the exterior. So many of you achievers are listening to this right now and you're nodding and you're saying, "My gosh, that's why I'm never happy." I'm always thinking if I could just exchange the furniture, if I could just change the external conditions, then I'll be happy, then I'll be happy, then I'll be happy. And every time you switch the furniture, every time you change the conditions of your life, you find yourself very short-term finding happiness. And then right back to the unhappy state. That's because you keep comparing your situation to someone else's. No matter how good yours is, you have to compare it to someone else. Someone else's recognition, someone else's well, someone else's supposed happiness, someone else's relationship, someone else's body, someone else's confidence.

• 8:25Ed Mylett?

  And that comparison is flooding you with unhappiness, no matter how good or how bad the external conditions of our lives are. Now, having said that, we've now found a formula, haven't we? That we know when we compare to something, it creates unhappiness in us. This is a key to success now. So we know to find happiness in our lives, we have to stop comparing. However, when there's an area we know we must change, stay with me here. When there's an area we know we must change, now we use comparison as a weapon to our advantage. Because most people are motivated by avoiding pain. Right? That's their motivation. To avoid unhappiness. And so I use comparison as a weapon, as a catalyst,

• 9:10Ed Mylett?

  to get leverage on myself to change. So I'm very conscious when I'm feeling unhappiness in an area that I'm not conscious of changing, to not do comparison. But when it's an area I must change, I do use comparison as my own weapon to get leverage. Because the gateway to get... People say to me all the time, "How do I get leverage? How do I get drive? How do I get that avoiding pain thing?" Comparison. Comparison. So it's a two-edged sword. We use it against ourselves too often in our life that gives us misery and unhappiness and takes our bliss away. And not enough of us leverage the power of unhappiness using comparison to our advantage. For a perfect example, right now, I'm not in the physical shape that I want to be.

• 9:53Ed Mylett?

  I am comparing myself to the previous fit version of me. And this discomfort, this dislike, this pain, this unhappiness that I'm flooding myself with by using the weapon of comparison to my advantage is a catalyst to get me going forward. I shared a story on social media the other day. I was at the gym. And I was working out and already not feeling great about how I've looked. I've had enough people comment, "Man, you're looking..." When you're a fit person, or if you're a male and you're kind of a, I don't know, a bodybuilder, whatever, but you have muscle on your body. When people see you, they haven't seen you for a long time, they'll say things like to you, "Hey, you're looking pretty lean. Look like you're slimming down." That's not what you want to say to someone who's sort of muscular, right? And that's usually code for you don't look as good. You're shrinking. Right? And so I've been hearing that lately from people. I had a good friend of mine hug me the other day, and he's like, "Wow, I can get my arms

• 10:38Ed Mylett?

  all the way around your back. You used to have these huge lats. Couldn't even get my arms around you. Your arms were so big, too." Like, wow. So I'm working out at the gym. And a young man's behind me, and I hear him say, "Hey, hey." And I finally lift my earphones off, and he says, "Mr. Mylett, would you please get out of the way so I can look at myself in the mirror when I'm working out?" I'm not kidding you. And I looked back at him, and I went, "Are you crazy?" I won't even give you the words that I really said to him, right? And I just will leave it at that. So I let him know that that wasn't an appropriate thing to say to me. But what I did is I used it as leverage when I left there. I'm like, my gosh, two years ago, no one would want me to get out of the way. No one would talk to me like that. But right now, I look so average or bad.

• 11:21Ed Mylett?

  He's like, get out of the way so I can look at somebody who's really jacked up and fit, right? And I'm leveraging that comparison to what I used to look like to my advantage. That's causing me to eat cleaner. I'm telling you, since that's happened, every meal that's been put in front of me, I think about in slow motion. I can see it in slow motion. Him telling me to get out of the way and me feeling like the most out of shape, not fit, human being on earth. And what I was doing was comparing myself to the two-year ago version of me when I was much bigger. And that comparison is giving me leverage, okay? And so I will use leverage to get me to do things. I will let people... See, a lot of people say that would knock a lot of people down. But that's not what it did to me. It gave me fuel to my fire. The winners use fuel to their fire.

• 12:06Ed Mylett?

  They'll use comparison as a weapon. When I see people succeeding in different areas, I don't use the comparison of them doing it to create unhappiness with me. I will use it tactically in specific situations to cause me to want to move away from how I feel about that comparison, either to my previous body, my previous wealth, my previous energy, my previous influence. Mike, my cameraman, and I were just talking today outside. And I said to him, you know, I used to be better speaker than I am now. And I said, man, if you'd have seen me years ago, you'd have seen the energy I brought, how dynamic I was, how articulate I was, compared to this version of me now. And the reason I'm doing that is I want to get better as a speaker. I'm using that comparison.

• 12:50Ed Mylett?

  It gives me pain and unhappiness to think about the kind of communicator I am now compared to how I viewed the previous situation. So I compared it to give me leverage to improve, to make it a catalyst to change. I understand when to use comparison and when not to. When I want to create a situation of change, I will leverage comparison to my advantage. When I want to create a situation of bliss and happiness, and I'm feeling unhappy in an area, I just always evaluate what I'm comparing at that time. And I remove the comparison, and it creates a happy situation. Remember this: when there's no comparison, there's always happiness. Where there is no comparison, unhappiness cannot exist. Comparison and unhappiness only coexist together.

• 13:35Ed Mylett?

  And so, I will only leverage this very dangerous thing called comparison. When it's an area I must change in my life to get leverage. For those of you that want to create change, it's okay to leverage it from time to time. But when you become addicted to the mechanism of comparison to get you going, to competing to get you going all the time, when you're always competing against others, always comparing with others. People say, "Well, there's a difference between competing and comparing." Truthfully, not much. And the fact of the matter is, to compete against somebody, you are typically comparing where you are to them. It's not necessarily a bad thing. But when you leverage that mechanism over and over, it's a pathway to unhappiness. When a woman goes out in the evening and she's feeling great about how she looks that evening,

• 14:20Ed Mylett?

  and she walks in and she immediately compares herself to the other people in the room. She will inevitably find a woman that she thinks is more attractive than her. And it steals your unhappiness for the entire evening. Men, same thing. Where, you know, maybe you've had some financial success and you're proud and you've gone out and you're, whatever, your new car or your new suit or you've got a new watch on or whatever. You're just feeling good about yourself. And then immediately when you go out, you begin to compare yourself to other men or other people. And what it will do is immediately steal all your joy. Or if you're a couple and you're having a beautiful date night and you happen to observe, you're comparing to other couples in the restaurant, for example. And there's just some couple who's more affectionate or holding hands differently or he opened the door for her.

• 15:06Ed Mylett?

  And you immediately steal your joy and create unhappiness for the evening. When you compare the treatment of your partner in the relationship to how your girlfriend's husband or boyfriend treats them. Or if you're a male in a relationship and you compare it to how one of your friend's wives or girlfriends treats them. You've immediately created a formula for unhappiness. You will never win the comparison game if your outcome is happiness. You will win the comparison game if your outcome is change or pain avoidance. So you gotta get clear on what your outcomes are. There's areas of your life where comparisons should never exist. And in most times, that's your relationships with other people. Don't compare to a previous time in your relationship because it'll create unhappiness. Don't compare to other relationships or other people.

• 15:50Ed Mylett?

  So I understand in my life where to use this weapon and where to put it down. And if you want to create more bliss, if you want to create more connection in your life, you need to learn to put the weapon, the very dangerous weapon, the very insidious weapon of comparison down most of the time. And only pick it up where you want massive change. And the truth of the matter is, there's probably one or two areas of your life at any given time that you're really working on changing. And you can harness the power of the comparative relationship to your advantage there. But what vast majority of us do, and I know this from my own experience is, we're always in comparison mode. We're comparing our home, our relationship, our fitness, our happiness, our strength, our energy, our looks, our brains, our accolades,

• 16:35Ed Mylett?

  our achievements to other people all the time. And we wonder why we live unhappy almost all of the time. It's because you're always comparing. You lose that every single time. You think, "Well, no, sometimes I compare and I'm ahead." It's not how your brain works. Your brain's eventually looking for the person that you lose to. Your brain is eventually going to find the better-looking, funnier, wealthier, fitter, happier, better-relationship-having person to wire you for pain. It's a part of our brain that was wired all the way back for survival mode in order to keep us functioning. The reason that this is so important is we both have two parts of ourselves. We have a higher self and what I'd call a lower self. And it's okay to live in both those places, but most happy people live in their higher self state the vast majority of the time. The higher self state is very inward.

• 17:20Ed Mylett?

  They're focused on themselves. They're focused on creating bliss and happiness. And their only thing that they ever focus on outside of there is their spirituality, the universe, their god, their connection with something bigger than them. Our lower self is always external. But we need to have that lower self because that lower self is that catalyst that gets us to move. That lower self does compete. That lower self does compare. It's a matter of having a life of both of success and fulfillment. Happiness and achievement. Happiness is achieved in the higher self by not comparing and not going external, not thinking the external furniture of life, or external people, or comparing outside of ourselves, or comparing to a different time outside of ourselves.

• 18:03Ed Mylett?

  That person right there that doesn't do that, they end up living very happily. The person who achieves leverages the lower self by competing and comparing when needed. And remember this also, the more we begin to learn about ourselves is always a win. The more we have a breakthrough and a discovery, there's probably some things I've said today that have made you think. There's probably some things you're evaluating and seeing in yourself that maybe you were blind to before. And just that discovery is a win. The more we begin to evaluate and discover what our thoughts really are, what our behaviors seem to be, our habits and our patterns, the more we become self-aware, the more we have the capacity to live as the higher self. And the more powerful it is when we leverage the lower self and we leverage comparison. And so, don't beat yourself up

• 18:48Ed Mylett?

  over what I've covered today. Self-awareness and self-discovery is what life's all about. And it's a win even if you discover something about yourself you're not proud of. Even if you discover something about yourself that you wish didn't exist or that you wanted to change, that's discovery. That awareness is 80% of the step to changing it. And so, give yourself some credit today for being aware, for being honest. Oftentimes, when content like this is covered, people sort of like to check the box of who they'd like to be and that it doesn't apply as opposed to who they really are. The truth is, everybody listening to this, and the man speaking this to you is too often in the lower self, too often creating unhappiness in our lives, including me, by comparison to previous times,

• 19:31Ed Mylett?

  other people, other conditions in our lives. And so, today, my challenge to you is to live as the higher self, to create more happiness with less comparison, to only leverage it when needed, but leverage it to achieve. But to find happiness we're always found in the higher self where we're not looking outside. You can probably tell by the way I've delivered this to you today that it's something that I'm working on myself. Self-awareness, self-discovery, self-improvement, and achievement are an ongoing process. ...that never ends as we try to max out our lives. It's not something we figure out and now we've got it. There's always another level of awareness, of discovery, of performance that we can find in our lives. And if today helped you do that just a little bit, an extra discovery, a little bit more awareness, maybe something you would teach to someone else.

• 20:16Ed Mylett?

  If it was just a little bit of a breakthrough, then today was progress. And it was for me just to be covering it. So I hope that today gave you value. I want to remind you every day, I want to create more value for you too. I run the Max Out 2 Minute Drill every day on Instagram. I've been doing it for a long time. It's sort of become famous on social media. And the way that it works is you turn your notifications on both stories and main posts on Instagram. And when I make a post in my main feed on Instagram, if you make a comment within the first 2 minutes, we usually extend it to 5 minutes, you get a chance to win. There's 3 ways to win. 1, make a comment in the first 2 to 5 minutes when I make a main post. I always post between 7:30 and 8 a.m. Pacific time, which is 10:30 and 11 a.m. Eastern time. Usually that's when I post. So just make a comment in the first 2 to 5 minutes.

• 20:58Ed Mylett?

  Or 2, or in addition to, make comments to other people's comments because I want to encourage collaboration and connection in the Max Out community and universe. So I'm going to reward people who do that. And 3rd, if you miss the first 2 minutes, just make a comment every day on every post, no matter what time it is. You could do it at 8 hours after, 10 hours after, 2 hours after. And we add up at the end of the week, people who just commented every day, and we pick a winner from there as well. So there's 3 ways to win. You can win coaching calls with me, my guests. We have one coming up in 2 weeks where people are riding on my jet with me that we selected to get coached with me and spend some time. Copies of my book, Max Out gear. Every week we decide what winners get that are new and different. And tickets to see me speak, etc. So I encourage you to engage with me in the Max Out 2 Minute Drill. I just want to say thank you and God bless you and your family and continue to max out.