Some days I feel like I’m going so slowly that I’m rolling backward. Where ever it is I’m going — and I’m frequently not sure where that is — it often seems as though all my freelance friends are getting there faster and flaunting it better once they get there. Sometimes I feel like I’m back in junior high school comparing my thrift-store jeans to the designer brands of my rich classmates. Meanwhile, they’re all looking back at me feeling equally inferior.

It always amazes me how much time we humans waste on caring what other people think about us, while everyone else is busy worrying what we think about them. How much time and energy could we save if we gave up comparing ourselves to other people? If we stopped caring what other people thought about us?

I’m not saying we should turn a blind eye to someone’s badmouthing our businesses or never engage in a healthy debate about why our buddies’ ways of doing things might or might not be better than ours. I’m saying that it might be a waste of time to agonize over our friends’ successes, to beat ourselves up because it’s taking us longer than we’d hoped to climb the freelance writing career ladder.

Most days, I couldn’t care less about any of the above. I receive emails from time to time from folks who say things like “I’m so impressed with how unconventional you are and how you don’t use society’s standards to measure your success.” The fact is, I truly am successful, and I’ve achieved financial success as a freelancer in a relatively short amount of time. Most days, I amaze myself. I don’t say this to be a boasting ninny, but to illustrate a point: no one is immune to feeling like a failure once in a while.

Like the serenity prayer, muttered hourly by struggling recovering alcoholics everywhere, I find myself repeating the AA-coined mantra progress not perfection about my freelance writing career as frequently as I do about my no-longer-so-newfound sober lifestyle.

My goal isn’t to race my freelance buds to some proverbial finish line. My goal is to keep moving forward. Sometimes the going is slow as hell, and I feel as though I’m moving backward. Sometimes I have to back up a bit, examine whether the road I’ve taken was the one I meant to turn down. Sometimes I change lanes, take another road entirely. But through it all, as long as I’m moving toward something, I am satisfied. I’ve learned that no matter how fast we go, we’ll always want to go faster. I’ve gone faster. I’ve crashed and burned, several times. Slow, for me, is better.

What’s your speed limit? Do you measure your progress against your perceived perfection of others?