Cyclops

I've been playing League of Legends for about... almost 3 years now. 99% of the time I am playing with people I know which usually ends up being people from my church. When I used to play "seriously" I would spam solo queue games and I actually became pretty good at the game. The church people I play with barely play the game outside of playing with each other. They play pretty casually and have no real desire to get better at the game so they are not that great at the game. Despite me not taking the game very seriously anymore I still try my best to improve and win games so although I've lost a lot of skill from my "peak", I've still retained a lot of the skills I once had.

The church people I play with generally think I'm very good. So good, that they are under the impression that I carry them 24/7. The reality of the situation is I'm just a slightly above average player but...relative to them I'm just on a whole 'nother level. I'm able to (well, hopefully anyway) objectively look at myself as a player and say "yea I'm not that good" because I don't compare myself with anyone. But if I did compare myself to the church people I'd think that I am a very good player.

I started with this because I recently have applied this to other various aspects in my life. When I applied this idea to my life the first thing that came to my mind was kindness. I like to think of myself as a kind person, but then I realized that my thought process always used a comparison between me and other people I know. I would always think "Yea, I'm kind. I do x, y, and z where as other people do a, b, and c."

Understanding that I might actually be kind but just kinder than some of the people around me was very eye opening. Comparing yourself to others around you isn't always a bad thing (e.g. if you surround yourself with people you you aspire to be) but I think in general it isn't something that you should be doing. My mom has a phrase she likes to throw around which is "among the blind men, the one eyed man is king". From what I understand, this essentially means that yea, the dude with the one eye is better off than all those blind guys... but in the end he still only has one eye.

This is to say that these comparisons are dangerous because it can easily make people complacent. I guess this doesn't really matter to people who don't want to improve themselves/ people who are satisfied with being better than the people around them. But for everyone else, it would be good to look at yourself and see if you're defining yourself relative to those around you. Who knows, you could be a one eyed man.