~ by Marcelle Qawuqji ~
When we lived in Rochester, I admired my new friend Mona.
We both had young children. I had my two boys — Abe, who was five, and Sammy, my hyperactive eighteen-month-old. Mona had four. She was very active at our place of worship. She was cheerful, always volunteering to teach, her dishes for potluck dinners were delicious, she ran the women’s study group, and she was beautifully dressed.
I did my best to volunteer as much as I could, but it was a struggle. The process of getting the boys into snow boots, jackets, finding mittens, and securing car and booster seats was tedious and painful, particularly when it was four degrees outside. We had a comfortable house, but I could never quite catch up with the laundry. Lego, Magna Doodles and boys’ socks were usually all over the floor, and the elegant master bathtub was full of rubber toys.
We had a happy and full life, but I always felt I wasn’t doing enough. Not like the other mothers. Not like Mona. I thought she was some kind of Super Mom.
Then I went to her house
Mona invited me over with my boys for lunch and a play date, and said to follow her by car after a meeting.
While I was buckling my boys into their car seats, Mona had already settled her children into her van and was waiting for me to follow her out of the parking lot. As I drove behind her, I noticed her daughter walking around inside the moving van.
No wonder she got out of the parking lot so fast.
We got to her house. The walls were covered in crayon and pencil scribbles. We had lunch, and I was trying to work out how to diplomatically raise the car seats when I was distracted by her son pushing a pencil into an electrical outlet that hadn’t been childproofed.
What I actually learned
For a long time I took the simple lesson from this: Mona wasn’t as together as she looked, therefore I was doing fine.
That’s the comfortable version, and I don’t think it’s quite right.
The truer version is that I had been comparing my entire life — laundry, socks, the tedium of snow boots, the constant sense of falling behind — against the two hours a week I saw of hers. She was cheerful and beautifully dressed at our place of worship. That was the sample I had.
Everybody’s two hours a week look good. That’s what the two hours are for.
Mona wasn’t a fraud. She was a woman with four young children, managing the way she was managing, and I had no idea what any of it cost her. What I saw was the surface, and I measured my depths against it, which is a comparison nobody can win.
I’d still have said something about the car seats. Some things aren’t a matter of different approaches. But the conclusion I drew about her life being unbalanced was me doing to her exactly what I’d been doing to myself — judging a whole life from a glimpse.
The same trap, in business
This is worth transplanting, because the pattern is identical and considerably more expensive.
Every business you compare yourself to is presenting its two hours a week. The polished website. The case studies where everything worked. The LinkedIn post about a record quarter. The conference talk about their process.
What you’re comparing that against is your own inside view: the client who hasn’t paid, the hire that isn’t working out, the system held together with a spreadsheet and hope, the month that was quietly terrible.
You are comparing their marketing to your accounting. It will never come out in your favour, and it has nothing to do with how the two businesses are actually doing.
I’ve watched owners make genuinely bad decisions on the back of this. Expanding because a competitor appeared to be expanding. Discounting because someone else looked busier. Hiring to match a headcount they saw on a website. In several cases, the business they were measuring themselves against was in serious trouble at the time.
What to compare instead
Not nothing — benchmarking is useful, and running a business with no external reference produces its own problems.
- Compare against your own last year. The only comparison where you have both sets of books.
- Compare specifics, not impressions. “They seem to be doing well” is useless. “They charge $X for that package” is actionable, and you can usually find out.
- Get the inside view from people who’ll give it to you. This is what peers who talk about real numbers are for. One honest conversation about what someone actually charges is worth more than a year of watching their marketing.
- Notice what you’re measuring. If the thing making you feel behind is a competitor’s Instagram, you have picked a metric that measures their photography.
The useful ending
After that visit I decided to be at peace with how much I volunteered outside my home. Not because Mona turned out to be worse at it than me, but because I finally understood I’d been competing against a version of her that didn’t exist.
I am doing this the way it works for my family. That was always the only standard that mattered.
