Starting later than your friends isn’t losing. It’s a different start time on the same track.

Watching friends get going ahead of you turns ordinary difference into a scoreboard, and there is no scoreboard. A later start is a later start, nothing more, and it says nothing about how far you will go or how well. People arrive at the same places from wildly different points, and most of them stop counting after a while. The clock you are reading was never official.

When the comparison shows up this week, try answering it with a fact instead of a feeling. Write down the one thing you want to be further along with by spring, and take the first small step toward it.