How to Stop Playing the No-Win Comparison Game as a Dad

Show Transcripts:

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Father On Purpose Podcast, featuring author and ministry leader, Kent Evans, and business executive and military veteran, Lawson Brown. This is a show for you, dad. You want to be a godly and intentional father? Unfortunately, you’ve turned to these two knuckleheads for help. Let us know how that works out for you. Before we begin, remember this, you are not a father on accident, so go be a father on purpose. Please welcome your hosts, Kent and Lawson.

Lawson Brown: All right. So, Kent… That sounded like a cough. I didn’t mean to just come right in and cough in your face. All you listeners, all you listeners of which there are-

Kent Evans: Both of you listeners.

Lawson Brown: Both of…

Kent Evans: Hello, to Lawson’s wife. Hello, to Kent’s wife. Good to see you too again, metaphorically speaking.

Lawson Brown: Gosh. It’s funny. Let’s talk about something that is running rampant in this world. I struggle with it too, find someone who says they’re immune from it and… Well, you finish the sentence. Let me read something to you. It’s about comparison, which is what I think is rampant, and something that I have in and out of my life, struggled with. I’m going to read this. My daughter sent this to me, a screenshot off of Instagram, something someone else posted. It says, the reason why we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind the scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.

Kent Evans: Oh, nice.

Lawson Brown: And I thought, girl, that is beautiful. I really appreciated her, first of all that she sent that, but also that she noted that that was not worthy. It’s so hard, man. We’ve talked about before with social media and it just it’s always in your face. The temptation to put yourself in a position where you are scanning constantly for how you measure up in our culture. Period. First of all, it’s easy. It’s understandable, but it is no bueno. It is no good. It does not… That’s what no bueno means.

Kent Evans: Dude, man-

Lawson Brown: But it just mean, no good.

Kent Evans: … we just reached a whole new audience with this show. Way to go. We’re now internationally.

Lawson Brown: Yes. Internationally acclaimed podcast to both of our wives. Hey, you know what though? Audrey is half Cuban.

Kent Evans: See, here we go.

Lawson Brown: Yeah. So let’s talk about comparison, man. What do you find in the audience of manhood journey?

Kent Evans: Yeah. I think one of the temptations for dads specifically when it comes to this topic of comparison, which if we’ve got to prove to the guys listening that we live in the comparison society, I’m afraid you guys are asleep at the wheel. It’s got to be at an all time high with social media, ever since the dawn of time. I’m sure the Greeks compared themselves to the Romans, but they just couldn’t do it.

Lawson Brown: Yeah. It’s not new, right?

Kent Evans: They couldn’t do it in real time. They couldn’t do it in photographs. I definitely think one of the ways it plays out as a dad is in, as we guide our families, we look around. And in one sense, looking around is healthy, right? Paul said in Philippians, “Follow me as I follow Christ.” So there’s a real good biblical case for having an example to follow as well as like wise counsel. Or Proverbs 1 basically says, “If you chuck counsel overboard, she’s going to kick you in the teeth.”

So the idea of looking around for counsel and for wisdom, that’s one thing. The idea, however, to look around as a dad and go, “Golly! Is my family as cool as that family?” Or, “Do I make as much money as that guy?” Or, “Is my pedigree as impressive as that person’s? Is my LinkedIn profile…?” “How many followers do I got?” Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And on and up dads. And so I think for dads, here’s the way it tends to manifest itself. Let’s not talk so much about the causes. Let’s talk about the manifestations, and we’ll try to get at them and find some antidotes to how we stopped doing some of this. One of the ways it manifests itself is, I use a real simple example that probably will just get people all riled up, which is great, school choice.

Your kids are four or five years old, and you’re deciding how you might get them educated in what kind of format. Right? So when I was a kid, you had public school and then you basically had like Catholic schools. That’s all I remember, at least as a kid. Is you had like parish kind of schools that were propped up behind mostly like a Catholic church, in at least part of the country where I grew up, and then you had public schools. And those were kind of your two choices. Now I think the flavors are much more, it’s like Baskin-Robbins. You do still have public school of course, you have private schools of various flavors and some are super pricey, and then you got this whole basket of other methods. You got homeschool, you have Montessori, you got like two day a week, three day a week, you got all these choices.

Lawson Brown: Right, right, right.

Kent Evans: So I think the school choice options today are much broader than they were say, 20, 30 years ago.

Lawson Brown: Which is super fantastic and fine.

Kent Evans: Which I think is cool. And I think it’s a little bit of a reaction to the public school system in a sense where it’s like, we’re going to try to find some other methods. It’s kind of like solar energy, we want to kind of get off of coal at some point so we start experimenting with solar. So for me, the way this manifests itself as a dad is, so let’s just take school choice, okay? You say, well, we’re going to send our kids to public school and here’s why, A, it saves us some money but also we want our kids to bump into the world and learn how to address culture on its own terms and et cetera, et cetera. Right? We want to be involved in our community and it’s right down the street. Okay, great. So, all these great choices you and your wife thought about it, prayed about it, talked about it, sought some counsel and decided we’re sending to public school.

Immediately. Immediately, if we’re not careful immediately, we start to justify that choice by finding all of the fault and the problems with the other choices. And so instead of just going, “Hey, Lawson, we decided to do school choice A, isn’t that cool?” We go, “We decided to do school choice A because man, all the B people and all the C people they’re just evil. They don’t love their children. They’re just bad people.” But here’s the reason why that’s happening, because deep down, I’m not so sure in my decision. Right? I’m not so sure. I don’t know if God told me to do it or if culture did or I was just trying to save a buck, I don’t know. So, therefore I got to go now start throwing rocks at the other decisions.

And so we get into this comparison game and I think we do it in church, I think we do it in our families, I think we do it in school choice and at the root of it, it’s almost like we want someone else either to tell us what to do so we can blame them if it doesn’t work out or we want to get to this place where in order to make my decision make sense, I’ve got to make the other decisions sound stupid.

Lawson Brown: Bro. Yeah. And it can become the label. It shouldn’t define you. Your choice of how you’ve chosen to put your kids through school, whatever the system is or process is, that’s not now going to become your family’s label. You don’t own that in all aspects of your life and then therefore everyone who is not that is less than or wrong or really headed down a wrong path.

Kent Evans: The thing that I look at in this sense from a spiritual standpoint is where we see throughout the New Testament when God inspired Paul and others to talk about the body of Christ and how each of the members of the body that we’re called have different functions and gifts and purposes. And that Ephesians 2: 10, the good work He called me to do might be different than the good work He called Lawson to do. And sometimes we can’t quite handle that. Mentally, you’re the pinky or you’re the eyeball or the left hand, and satan wants to get in there and go, “Oh man, pinkies don’t matter. Left hands don’t matter.”

Lawson Brown: Yeah. Why did He pick you for that? That’s not very good. Yeah. Just being transparent, I’ve had the thought before, with you and me. How many… We go back, what? 20 years?

Kent Evans: I mean like 19, too many. That’s for sure.

Lawson Brown: How much am I going to pay for this? Zero, is that right?

Kent Evans: Actually it’s quite the opposite, Lawson is one of our donors. You’re funding this episode. This episode is brought to you by Lawson Brown.

Lawson Brown: Brought to you by me. No.

Kent Evans: How far do we go back?

Lawson Brown: I was about to say though like, I’m really proud of you and respect what you’ve done with this ministry, which is why I feel so strongly about the financial support, the conversations that we have, this podcast. But I have thought like, man, is that all I am? Just a donor, a helper? Like, ah, look, why did God pick Kent to do His ministry work? Like, what am I missing? I don’t really believe that in my heart, you know what I’m saying? But it’s like, that’s not my role. That’s what He picked you for.

Kent Evans: What’s interesting about what you’re saying is, number one, on this podcast, you are my very favorite donor. Like seriously, of the people on this podcast talking with the microphone, you’re the top, number one most favorite guy who’s not named Kent. For real. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

Lawson Brown: I take back what I said.

Kent Evans: What’s interesting about what you’re saying is, you just reflected back what we even do in the church, right? So for example, we look at somebody like we glorify… And this, again, I got to be on my slippery slope here. So like, this may… Listen all the way to the end of this section, please. We glorify the guy who decides to sell everything and go to China and be a missionary or go to some dark place and be a missionary, and then we say nothing about the single mom who’s holding it all together by working two jobs. We don’t say anything about her because she didn’t do the big spiritual thing of becoming a missionary. And even in the church, that’s how satan weaves his way in to our thought processes. There’s even like a pecking order inside Christendom where it’s like, “Oh, so, what do you do for God?”

“Well, I lead a Bible study on Sundays.” “Oh, that’s cute. You’re like an eight on the scale.” That’s like, number one is the best. “What do you do for God?” “Oh, well, I volunteer as an elder, a deacon.” “Oh, shucks man. You’re a four. You’re almost near the top. You’re near the number one spot.” “What do you do?” “I’m a missionary. Oh my gosh. I finally met someone who’s the…” Wait a minute, wait a minute. Most of the guys I know who are doing amazing, amazing mission work are doing it on soccer fields and in PTA meetings and in their jobs that they’re leading their companies ethically.

Like I was on the phone recently with a CEO of a $40 million company. And we were talking about his business, and his heart’s passion was to lead that business in a way that glorified God, blessed his employees, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And he’s not a missionary. Or Lawson, or is he? And I think that’s the challenge, is we want to compare. Even in the church we want to compare who’s doing more or less work for God by whether or not their paycheck is super uncertain and comes from donors or their paycheck comes from like some Fortune 250. That’s not God’s economy. That’s not how He compares.

Lawson Brown: After the break, let’s talk about ways to avoid it. Ways to resist. Like, I need it myself just in general. It’s hard not to. I wish I were more filling the blank, more fit, more spiritually gifted, more…

Kent Evans: Would you like me to fill in the blank? I got it like a lot, if you want me to. Hang on everybody, Kent’s going to fill in all the blanks.

Lawson Brown: Oh, you’re so stupid.

Kent Evans: True. Well, I think, let me leave the guys before we hit the break, let’s talk about maybe a few areas where we’re probably tempted to compare and then we’ll come on the other side and address those as you’ve described Lawson. One is, I think, quickly in the area of money. It’s a very quick one. We tend to compare ourselves in money. I make X, you make 2X. I’m half as good as you are. That’s kind of how we think. We are grand… Especially Western culture. If you’re living in America and you’re listening to the podcast, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Number two, we compare ourselves in terms of power. How much influence do I have? How many people are, quote unquote, under me at work, and that whole thing. Money, power. We do compare ourselves in terms of like what I’ll call the vanity comparisons like looks and our level of attractiveness and all that. Am I as handsome as so-and-so. And we compare in that regard. And then I think we compare ourselves, especially as dads, we compare our marriage to other marriages and we compare our children to other people’s children.

Lawson Brown: So, we just compare our family then.

Kent Evans: Yeah. We compare our family. And I think, man, it’s such a slippery slope because in some ways you do want to learn, right? I really love to be around guys who are really good dads. And I ask them questions. I ask you questions all the time about adult children, because your kids are all older than mine and so you’ve been down some steps that I haven’t been down. That’s not comparison, that’s counsel. I want your wisdom, but I don’t need my kids to be just like yours. And so let’s talk about those areas. We’ve got to hit all of them, but there’s kind of the power and money and influence factors. There’s the family factors.

And then there’s, I think, the last one is the spiritual factor, in any given meeting, where the guy can just go, “I appreciate this conversation, but let’s just go to the Lord in prayer.” And he may be just wanting to go to the Lord in prayer, brilliant, glad he’s in the meeting. He may be flashing his spiritual amazingness card because he doesn’t know what to do with this conversation, so he’s just going to throw out the Trump card, I could dip down to talk with all you other humans, but instead I think we got to be careful of that as well. Let’s on the flip side of the break, talk about that.

Lawson Brown: That’s real talk, dude. Let’s do it.

Kent Evans: Hey dad, sometimes you need weekly encouragement on your father journey. That’s why we built a community of men that are basically the Navy SEALs of godly fatherhood. They are all located at fatheronpurpose.org. That’s fatheronpurpose.org. Now that is a monthly subscription of just 11 measly U.S. dollars. And when you join that community, you will get action items that are brief and biblical and you can put into play right away. Every week we release a dad mission video that is a short divo based on the Bible, with an action item, mission at the end, super practical. And plus, as a bonus, when you dive in, you get digital courses, eBooks, all kinds of other resources, not to mention you’re connected with dozens of other godly dads who are walking through the same issues you’re walking through and that community is very rich and vibrant. Come check it out today at fatheronpurpose.org. That’s fatheronpurpose.o-r-g.

So, Lawson here we are on the flip side of our commercial, whatever was in the middle there, we drop a few different ones in, I don’t know what you were just asked to do on this specific episode, but whatever it was, go do it, man. Pull over the car you’re driving and get it done. Okay. We talked about comparison and we talked about… Let’s talk about the family comparison. I know we have a lot of dads listening and they’ve probably heard the talks about money and power and sex and fame and power and all that stuff and influence. Let’s talk about family comparison. What do you think some dads are tempted to do when it comes to comparing their family against some other family? How does that normally look for a dad?

Lawson Brown: You may have different opinion on this. I think mothers do that pretty naturally, pretty easily, pretty quickly. If you know another guy pretty well and you’re both dads and you’re in the right kind of trusted environment and it’s kind of, air quote, okay to talk openly about it, then I think you’d get more real conversation. But usually the talk is, so what do you do for a living? And then it goes from there. And that’s the comparison. That’s how it begins. And I can tell you, firsthand experience, it’s been a long time, but when I had a, quote, high powered title at one time, I couldn’t wait for that question to come my way. And my ego just thrived on it. It was gross to not-

Kent Evans: I basically run your life, even though you don’t understand that I run your life.

Lawson Brown: Dude, I was just ate up with the title and chasing money. And so when you said that about money and power and, how many direct reports do you have, and how big is your business? That rings true. Dads start there and then get into propping up what their family life is really like. Like I said in the beginning about, we compare our behind the scenes to everyone else’s highlight reels, I think we just generally are tempted to lead with our highlight reel, unless we are in a genuine relationship with someone who you know has got your best interests. I wrote something down earlier and you kind of hit on it too, comparison is different from comparing notes with a trusted faithful partner.

Kent Evans: Did I say that?

Lawson Brown: No, no. If you will let me.

Kent Evans: I thought you… I’m sorry.

Lawson Brown: I’m…

Kent Evans: In case you guys can’t tell, we make this podcast up as we go along. Like, there’s really almost very little scripting ahead of time.

Lawson Brown: I said, I said, not you, different from comparing notes-

Kent Evans: It’s when I hear good quotes, I tend to think I probably said them.

Lawson Brown: … and different from challenging each other, which is what I think men are attracted to do. Like, and when you’re in a trusted relationship with another guy that you honestly know has got your best interest and your kids, and maybe knows in a little bit better. But I think until then, man, a lot of us just kind of posture and promote our highlight reels.

Kent Evans: Yeah. Man, that’s true. I love what you said. Comparison isn’t the same thing as comparing notes. That is brilliant. Way to go, Kent. Good job. It’s funny you say that because I recall one time meeting a guy at a breakfast in our city and I asked him what he did, and he told me he worked at a particular company. And I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” So as the conversation wore on, we eventually traded business cards and then we parted ways. A little while later I found his business card in my pocket and I pulled it out and it said CEO and president. And I remember thinking, he didn’t say I run, I’ve founded, I’m a multimillionaire business leader, which were all true. He just said, I work at a company. And I thought, wow, I never forgot it. That was probably 1999. That was over 20 years ago. I remember when I met this guy roughly and I just thought, oh my goodness, that’s so good.

I saw a quote the other day, Jon Acuff, the author, I think he’s hilarious. I love Jon. And he said he was with a billionaire in some kind of business, and evidently it was the restaurant business. And Acuff said that he was with this billionaire a few times and whenever this billionaire, someone would ask him what he did, he would say I’m in customer service. And he was the owner of this big chain of something. And he would just say, I’m in customer service. And then he would just move on and ask him a question about themselves. And I think that’s really important.

The marriage and relational expert, John Gottman talks about bids for connection. I don’t know if he invented the idea, but it’s the idea that, when we go to a social event, like you mentioned a minute ago, and we say, “Hey, what do you do?” What that is, is it’s a bid for connection. What I mean is, it’s almost like I’m holding out a thing and I’m bidding. I’m holding out a nickel and seeing if you’ll hand a nickel back to me. I’m trying to connect with you and I’m trying to find a seamless, easy way to connect. What do you do? And then over time, if you keep responding to my bids for connection, the amounts go up like in a sense that we can connect at a higher level, we can connect at a deeper level.

And so if my bid for connection is what do you do, sometimes though, we turn those bids for connection into bids for competition, right? And what I’m saying is, here’s what I do, what do you do? And deep down to your point, you were itching to have someone ask you, what do you do? Because you knew your job does impressive.

Lawson Brown: Yeah, I would ask them what they did so that they would have to then ask me.

Kent Evans: Dude, that’s real. That’s so real. Hi, what’s your little thing that you do. So, like when you’re done, I can talk some more.

Lawson Brown: Yeah, no. Gosh. I just cringe. I look back on myself going, I wonder how many people I was doing that with and in my own head and then they leave the conversation, and it was that CEO that you mentioned that said, I’m in customer service and he was just shaking his head, like, what an immature little brat.

Kent Evans: I think it was C.S. Lewis who said something like, I’m not going to quote him exactly but he said something like, if you meet a truly humble person, what you’re going to think after you talk with them for a while is, it was interesting to me how interested that person was in me. Like, so when you meet a truly humble person, your reaction is going to be, “Golly! They really seemed interested in me.” Because they’re not… By definition, the humble person isn’t self-absorbed, which means there are others absorbed, like they’re thinking about other people. And I think for us as dads, the comparison game only leads us to one of two places, right? There’s no good like outcome where you go. There’s not really a neutral, there’s a down shift where if we’re comparing ourselves against other people who are farther along than we are…

Like, for example, I’ve got my third book coming out this summer at the time we’re recording his podcast and I tend to compare myself to other authors. Which is awful because I lose every one. It’s like, literally there’s almost no authors I can compare myself to where I’m ahead. So… Seriously. I mean, true story. The one thing we do is we compare ourselves to the experts in our field or the dude who’s been at it a lot longer or whatever, and we feel sad. So outcome number one is despondency and sad and self-recrimination, and we’re like, “Oh I’m never going to make it, I’m not Max Lucado, I guess I should stop.” And that’s kind of comparison one.

Or the other side is, we compare ourselves… And this is what I’ve done, a couple of guys have entered into the book space and honestly, Lawson, seriously, their books are terrible. I mean, awful. Like bad grammar, there’s typos throughout them, the covers are awful, they don’t have a UPC code. I’m like, man, who did your book cover? And my temptation is to compare myself to those guys and go, what an idiot. And so that’s just pride, right? So the only two outcomes of comparison we tend to find ourselves with is either deep sadness or cocky arrogance. Those are usually the only two outcomes.

Lawson Brown: I don’t know who said it, but isn’t there some quote like comparison is the thief… I’m looking it up. Comparison is the thief of joy. Unless you’re comparing yourself to loser book guys that you scour the earth for.

Kent Evans: Who would do that? What bad person would do something like that. I definitely think, and here’s what happens, the encouragement I want to give dads, I want to end on a high note. Number one, my book’s better than your book, that’s the high note for you. What I’d like to do is, I want to kind of end as… Let’s have the plane be lifting up as we end. And here’s what I want to give dads, is a couple kind of like antidotes to comparison. Antidotes to comparison. One antidote is faithfulness. Faithfulness. And here’s what I mean by that. Here’s what I mean by that. As a dad, we can look around and go, “Whoa, golly! That guy’s kids got into Harvard” or “That guy’s kids, they all went on mission trips” or “That guy’s kids never seem angry” or whatever, right?

And we look around family-wise or we’re comparing ourselves to this other guy and how much money he has or his vacation homes or whatever. And one of the antidotes to that whole mess is faithfulness. And what I mean by that is, what has God asked you to do? I think of the scripture in the Old Testament, when God’s talking to Moses and He says to Moses, when Moses is fighting them about going to the Pharaoh, He says, “What is that in your hand? What does that in your hand?” And Moses is like, “Well, staff.” And God says with you and that staff, we’re going to do something amazing. And what I think part of the message to that part of Moses experience with God is God’s going, “Hey, look man, I gave you that staff. You got that thing and I want you to be faithful with that thing.”

And so you might be the dad of a family who all you can afford to do for a vacation is go to the Piggly Wiggly and get an extra bag of Oreo cookies. That’s your vacation this summer. Well, you don’t got to compare yourself to the dude who took his whole family to Europe on a cruise. You were faithful to what God gave you in the moment, in the moment. And for me, faithfulness is the answer. So, as Mark Batterson said, in his book, The Circle Maker, he talks about guys like me, who are going to write. He’s like, if God told you to write, go write. And if the books don’t sell, who cares, that’s His problem. Maybe you’re a bad marketer, or maybe you need a better PR person but at the end of the day…

Lawson Brown: … maybe that wasn’t God’s purpose.

Kent Evans: Right. The whole point is I felt like I did my part. I did my part. I wrote the thing. And so at the end of the day, we got to just be faithful to the call. It’s like Ephesians 2: 10, God has prepared good works for you, Lawson, to do. And for Kent to do. I don’t got to do Lawson’s works, and Lawson doesn’t have to do my works.

Lawson Brown: Perfect, yeah.

Kent Evans: Now, sometimes we might be called to do something together like this podcast, but at the end of the day, dad just be faithful. What is that you have in your hand? Who are those people you have under your roof? Let’s be discipling those people, let’s be engaged in their lives and let’s leave some of the comparisons behind. That’s one antidote I think we can discuss as it relates to comparison, is how to be faithful. What’s one or two things, Lawson, that come to mind for you that a dad who’s kind of struggling in this area of comparison. What would you say to that dad if he’s listening in?

Lawson Brown: It’s okay right now. You’re not alone. Don’t feel like you alone are the one that struggles with this, we all do. Find somebody that you can talk to and be real with and ask for their help. Ask a partner to pray with you about it. Be real before God and ask for help. And then you become more and more adept at recognizing when you’re doing it. And you’ll feel the joy returning and the contentment that can rest on you when comparison begins to dissolve in your life, and you can do it.

Kent Evans: And also, please go by some of my books so that my fragile ego can make it to the next podcast episode halfway intact. I think it’s what you meant to say. I’ve been playing back what you actually said and what you meant to say. The good news is, if a guy does get off this podcast and decides to go buy one of my books, he’ll actually move the needle. Like, we’ll notice it.

Lawson Brown: That’s what I’m afraid of.

Kent Evans: We’ll notice it.

Lawson Brown: Yeah.

Kent Evans: Well, if you go buy one more of like Rick Warren’s books or Max Lucado’s books, he won’t even notice.

Lawson Brown: Yeah. Well, he’ll never even notice.

Kent Evans: You think he’s going to appreciate you? He’s not going to appreciate you. Okay? You’re like customer 11,987,492. But for me, I will notice it.

Lawson Brown: Yeah. You’re going to be customer number seven.

Kent Evans: Well, let’s not get carried away. Let’s not get carried away.

Lawson Brown: Yeah. I wrote this down for next time. I wrote challenge, I added to our list, challenge to faithfulness, because we’ve talked before about some of it is you just got to be better disciplined. You just got to work harder, and you got to ask…

Kent Evans: Do better.

Lawson Brown: … for help from God more often. Yeah. Right? So it is something that we dads need to challenge each other. We’ve got to be the flag that is stuck in the ground that doesn’t move, and we are faithful.

Kent Evans: Amen, brother. Hey, thanks for listening this week, guys, we’re pumped and we can’t wait to come to you next week with the power packed episode. We’ll see you on the other side. God bless.

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Speaker 1: You’ve been dozing off to the Father On Purpose Podcast, featuring Kent Evans and Lawson Brown. Now, wake up, head over to fatheronpurpose.org for more tools that and help you be a godly, intentional and not completely horrible dad. Remember, you are not a father on accident, so go be a father on purpose.