One juicy bit of advice, that came to me relatively late, was to never compare your inside with someone else's outside. You're comparing your messy, uncertain interior world to someone else's carefully curated exterior.
Their Instagram feed shows the fabulous holiday, not the arguments about where to go beforehand. Their LinkedIn celebrates the promotion, not the sleepless nights of doubt. Their dinner party looks effortless, but you missed the frantic tidying, the tantrum and the burnt first attempt at dessert.
Meanwhile, you're intimately familiar with every one of your own wobbles, mistakes, and moments of feeling completely out of your depth.
It's an unfair comparison. You're judging your rough draft against their final edit, and often, only a glimpse of that final edit.
The person you admire for their confidence is probably scrolling through your posts right now, wondering how you make everything look so straightforward.
We all have an inside story. It's filled with uncertainty, small failures, and figuring things out as we go along. But we rarely share that version. I was in my 40's when I figured it out. 40 years of thinking I was inferior to everyone else.
The most put-together person you know is also making it up as they go along. We all are.