Stop comparing others.

 When you stop comparing yourself to others, you can accomplish great things, says wheelchair athlete Dean Furness. He shares how, after losing the use of his legs in an accident, he discovered a powerful new mindset focused on redefining his "personal average" and getting better little by little.

I’ve lived most of my life comparing myself to others. At first, it was school and sports. But as I got older, I began comparing other metrics: job title, income level, house size, and worldly successes.

The funny thing is, this is what most of us do at one time or another — and some of us do pretty often.

It’s a sure-fire recipe for a drop in self-confidence and for unhappiness. It’s also not that useful.

Next, I want to say something about me. When I was a child, I would run around the house in fear looking for my parents, but not looking closely enough to find that they were upstairs, or in the kitchen. I realize now that I never learned from those mistakes. I never looked harder to find my Mom or my Dad, I gave up on the spot if I couldn’t run around the house and find them in a minute. Every time I thought they were lost or gone forever, they always came back. But at the moment I finally found one of my two parents, I would hug them harder than I did the last time, to make sure that if that hug was somehow the last, that it might count, or that I could remember their scent or how comforted I felt when I was in the protection of their arms. Whenever my mom came to find me, she was always in the middle of doing something important.