We see the trunk. We never see the roots. And that's exactly why the comparison trap can negatively impact your growth.
📌 Part of the Mindset Series. Catch up on The Time-for-Money Trap and Why We Stopped Waiting Until We Had It All Figured Out before reading this one.
The scroll that started this post
It happens to all of us. You're scrolling, minding your own business, and someone's income report pops up. $14,000 last month from a business they started in their garage two years ago. A screenshot of a passive income dashboard ticking over while they're on holiday.
And for a second or 2, you feel behind. Even if five minutes earlier you felt completely fine about where you were at.
That feeling isn't a character flaw, it's just comparison doing what comparison does. It feels like a kick in the guts that someone appears to be succeeding at the very thing you are trying to build. But what if you thought about the whole thing in a different way?
The problem with the comparison
Here's the thing nobody tells you about the person and the journey behind that income report. You're seeing their trunk and established, fruit-bearing income branches.
What you're not seeing is the two, five, sometimes ten years of roots they grew first. The failed first attempt nobody posted about. The eighteen months of effort before the first dollar landed. The version of them that was just as uncertain as you feel right now.
Comparing your seedling to someone else's fully grown tree isn't just unfair. It's comparing two completely different points in time and pretending they're the same moment.
A tree planted five years ago will always look more impressive than one planted this year. That's not a verdict on the younger tree. It's just where it is on the timeline. Given the same care and the same time, it gets there too.
What this looked like for us
We're not going to pretend we're immune to this, because we're not. Early on, we'd look at established finance creators — years of content, thousands of subscribers, income streams that had been compounding since before we'd even had the idea for The Money Tree Project — and feel a version of 'why are we even bothering.'
It took us longer than we'd like to admit to realise we were comparing our week three to someone else's week three hundred. Of course the numbers looked different. We were looking at completely different stages of the same process.
The moment that actually shifted things wasn't some big epiphany. It was just deciding to stop checking. Not forever, but long enough to break the habit of measuring our early progress against someone else's established processes.
What to track instead
If comparing yourself to others isn't useful, what is? In our experience, three things:
- Compare this month to last month. Not to anyone else's month — to your own. Is the trend moving in the right direction, even slowly?
- Compare effort to outcome, not outcome to someone else's outcome. Did the work you put in this week actually build something, regardless of the dollar figure attached?
- Compare where you are to where you started. Not where you are to where the twelve-year veteran is standing today.
Your only useful comparison is the version of you now vs the version of you yesterday . Everyone else is running a completely different race, at a completely different pace, that started at a completely different time. Keep getting better one day at a time.
None of this means ignoring what other people are doing. There's real value in learning from people further into their journey, but that's a different thing entirely to measuring your worth against their results.
The timeline you're actually on
Every branch on our own money tree is still young. We know that. We're not pretending otherwise, and we're not going to dress up month five as if it's year five.
But comparing our early, bare branches to someone else's fully leafed-out canopy was never going to do anything except make us want to quit before the roots had a chance to take hold. So we stopped. And the work got a lot more sustainable once we did.
If you're in the thick of your own comparison spiral right now — mid-scroll, feeling behind — consider this your reminder that you're not behind. You're just earlier. And earlier is exactly where every single fully grown tree you're comparing yourself to used to be.
What's next
Next up in the Mindset Series, we're pulling all of this together — the trap, the myth, the waiting, the comparing — into what we actually believe now, and why it changes how we're approaching every experiment from here.
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← Previous: Why We Stopped Waiting Until We Had It All Figured Out (Mindset Series, Post 3 of 5)
Next: Mindset Series, Post 5 of 5 — coming soon →
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
- The Time-for-Money Trap (And Why Most of Us Are in It) — Mindset Series, Post 1
- What It Really Means to Make Money While You Sleep — Mindset Series, Post 2
- What Financial Freedom Actually Means to Us — Origin Story, Post 2
ABOUT MR & MRS MONEYTREE
We're a husband-and-wife team with a young family and a simple goal: to build a life with more flexibility, freedom, and choice baked into it. The Money Tree Project is how we document that journey — openly, honestly, and without the fluff.