To Overcome Challenges, Stop Comparing yourself to Other

 Dean Furness with our life 

This TED talk, Dean Furness shared the story of the accident that left him in a wheelchair, and what that experience taught him about "personal averages" and the importance of not letting other people impact how we think about ourselves.

“Everything I learned and knew about my height, my strength and mobility was washed away,” he says. "My whole personal normalcy has been restored. Now you're sure that in those days I was measured more than ever by doctors and nurses, certainly, but perhaps in my heart. I thought I could go on with what I could do for a while. I'm going to be able to. I am very disappointed. "

As Furness continued his rehab, he explains that he would have good days and bad days. "What I found out is that good and bad didn't have a lot of meaning unless I had the context of knowing what my average was. It was really to me to decide if something was bad or good, based on where I was at that point in time. It was in my control to determine if it really was a bad day, in fact it was my decision on whether or not I could stop a streak of bad days."

 Through training for and participating in a wheelchair half marathon, a "door closed" behind Furness; his goal became less about walking again, and he began to research wheelchair racing instead. "I'd learned my lesson," he says. "I was really careful not to compare with how accomplished those people on the internet were, and how fast they were, because if I had, I would never have continued going through it."

"Take some time, and focus on you instead of others," he says, recalling how the inherently solitary nature of training in a wheelchair has meant that he has learned to prioritize his own results and performance, without holding them up against other people's.

 "It seems as though those personal averages are almost always used to measure where we are in comparison to our peers," he says. "I think we should look at that a little differently. That personal average is just that; it's something very personal, it's for you, and I think if you focus on that and start to build that, you can really start to accomplish some amazing things."

 However, with Dean Furness's life story and every word he utters in this discussion the biggest and most important message we should take in our lives is that we should never be compared to another person for any reason. And we should not be weak-minded for any reason and look at everything in a positive way.

Furthermore, It seems we have been measured almost all of our lives, when we are infants, with our height and our weight, and as we grew it became our speed and our strength and even in school there are test scores and today with our salaries and job performance. It seems as if those personal averages are almost always used to measure where we are in comparison to our peers and I think we should look  at that a little differently. That personal average is just that, it's something very personal and it's for you, and I think if you focus on that and work to build that, you can really start to accomplish some really amazing things