Over the weekend, I listened to the Naval Ravikant interview on The Knowledge Project.

It’s one of their most popular episodes ever, and for good reason. Naval has prodigious knowledge and is a voracious reader and successful entrepreneur. He has spent decades examining and reexamining everything about…everything in his life.

Naval talks a lot about quieting our ego, about reminding ourselves that we are, in the end, insignificant (“we will be totally forgotten in three generations”). Not a brand-new thought, but a helpful reminder.

Think of the countless hours we spend keeping score, the unconscious comparisons that are at the root of so much of our suffering.

To put a finer point on this, Naval has a great riff about jealousy.

If we’re going to be jealous, he argues, it’s meaningless to focus on one thing—a person’s beauty, their wealth, their ease in social situations, or whatever else stands out to us. Any of these attributes is inexorably connected to everything about that person.

So, we either must want to have someone’s entire life, or none of it. There’s nothing in between.

This feels a lot more actionable to me than “don’t be jealous of anyone, ever.”

There’s no life that’s the amalgamation of the “best” bits and pieces that we see around us.

Our strengths connect directly to our vulnerabilities. All of our greatest blessings are intimately connected to the things we love a little less about ourselves or about our lives.

While that other person is great at being themselves, we are the best in the world at being us.

If you’ve made a set of choices in pursuit of longer-term, outward-in goals, the markers of that success won’t be the traditional ones.

Don’t be distracted by the things that are easiest to see and measure in others. These are but one product of a different set of choices than the ones you’ve made.

Keeping on being you.

You’re the world’s best at that.