Gordon Flett

I've got the hit song everywhere.

And it still wasn't enough.

And this is what sadly happens with some people who are trying to strive for significance through being perfect.

They discover that the interpersonal issues are still there.

They're not getting that sense of importance, that sense of love and attention that they absolutely covet.

And it's very sad that many famous people still have the problems of not feeling great about themselves due to that unmet need to matter.

Yes, there's an incredible amount of comparison that goes on, and it's really destructive.

There's no way to win the comparison game, especially now when people are putting crafted images of perfect lives online that are not actually real.

But I do remember in terms of social comparison, the best example I can give of somebody who was a perfectionist who compared too much was the late, great Brian Wilson, who just recently passed away, who suffered from extreme mental health problems that became well-known to everyone today.

And he was comparing himself to the Beatles and driving himself to the point of right over the edge.

And at one point he said that he couldn't keep up with the Beatles.

The Beach Boys, of course, were remarkable in their own right, but he needed to try and keep up with the Beatles in the heydays of Beatlemania.

Yet this is Brian Wilson who becomes famous and has entertained people around the world and will continue to even as his legacy.

But he was torturing himself through these comparisons and

You know, the lesson to people listening will be there's no way to win the comparison game, even if you're somebody as famous as Brian Wilson, because you can always find a way.

Yeah, I've heard Olympic champions talk about how they're frustrated because if they'd only not made a mistake, including some of our own Canadian champions, nobody would have beat that record for a longer time.

Yet, you know, you did it.

You won the gold medal.

Donovan Bailey talked about the mistake he made coming out of the blocks as he set the world record and won the gold medal at the Atlanta Olympics.

And later he's thinking about the mistake that he made because he could have gone faster and then his record would have been protected longer.