Board a long overseas flight and you walk through the business cabin to reach your seat.
That's deliberate. The airline has other doors. They could board you from the back, or from the middle. They use the front because they need, by design, to make you feel the difference.
So you file past the flat beds. Somebody is being served a cocktail. Somebody has a pillow that looks like a real pillow. You carry that picture down to a seat in economy minus, all the way at the back next to the toilet, and then you sit in it for eight hours.
So what decides whether those eight hours are bearable.
The plane lands once. He's in London, you're in London. She's in Zurich, you're in Zurich. The luxury was real. The luxury was also eight hours long.
Spend the flight tracking what the front of the plane is being served, and it's going to be the most miserable eight hours of your life, and you land at the same minute anyway.
This class has a business cabin too. The business class is the people who can afford to study eight or ten hours a day.
My son is in it. He's nineteen. I asked him to learn this program when he was sixteen. He lives with me and he doesn't pay rent, so he has no financial pressure, and he can put eight hours into a day without deciding what to give up for them. In 2011, if I didn't work eighty hours a week, I couldn't pay rent, because my income was so low.
The ability to study eight hours a day is luxury. It isn't a character trait, and it's handed out unevenly.
So when somebody in your cohort is moving faster, it's almost never that they're smarter than you. They have more time. Fewer people depending on them. And when you're thirty five, forty, fifty, life accumulates, and your brain is occupied all the time.
There's exactly one comparison that carries information, and it isn't against the room. I will always compare myself with yesterday's myself.
Who in your cohort are you already measuring yourself against, and what do you actually know about their week?
You know their pace. That's the whole list. You don't know their rent, their hours, who depends on them, or what they gave up to move that fast. You're setting your whole circumstances against their visible output, and that isn't a comparison at all.