#297 Don't Fall for the Comparison Trap
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Hello English learners, how are you doing today? Welcome back to the Level Up English podcast, the best place to come to practice the English language, learn about the British accent and culture with me, your host, Michael Lavers.

I want to talk all about the comparison trap today. The comparison trap. So this is something that we all do from time to time and this is comparing ourselves to other people which is usually a bad thing to do. It's usually not good to compare yourself. So in this episode today we'll be talking all about why we compare ourselves and maybe how we can avoid this as well.

but I'm going to make it a little bit more useful for English learners. So, of course, we'll be talking about comparisons in different areas of life as well as in language learning, but I also want to share some comparative structures.

In the past, we looked at superlatives a few weeks ago, which is when we use EST, like the biggest, the highest, the best, the most. Comparative is a bit similar, but this is ER. So bigger, better, more, higher, right? We're using these words. And there's a few different ways we can use comparatives to compare two different things in English.

And now we're going to start very simple where maybe most of you will already know how to use this, but we're going to get a little bit harder as we go through. So maybe some of you will learn something new, but even if you don't, it's always nice to review and it's nice to hear different structures used in context. And maybe it will encourage you to use them more yourself as well. If you want to get better,

better, there's one comparative word, better with your English, better at English, then you might consider signing up to our email community. This is something that I always forget to talk about, but this is a free way to keep in touch, keep up to date with what I'm doing and also get free lessons sent to your email inbox twice a month.

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Or you can head to the website and if you go right down to the bottom of the website at Level Up English, there'll be a little sign up area there as well. But hopefully I will see you there. But OK, let's talk about something that is known as the comparison trap. Trap is something that we get stuck inside and we can't move out of it.

So as much as I might talk about not doing this, I do frequently fall prey to the comparison trap. If you fall prey to something, that means something defeats you, right? You're defeated by something. I fall prey to this problem. I am defeated by this problem.

I often fall prey to the comparison trap. This is where we compare ourselves to other people and we always feel inadequate as a result. Adequate means good enough. Inadequate, of course, means not good enough. So when we compare ourselves too much, we feel inadequate.

And this can be comparing your possessions, what you own to what somebody else owns, your income, your appearance or your skills and your knowledge. There's many different ways we can compare ourselves. I'll talk a little bit about how I do this. I think it's generally for me the last one I compare my level of skill and knowledge in something. That's the hardest one for me personally.

But this is a really insidious frame of mind that has become, I would say, become more of a problem since social media has grown in popularity over the last 10, 20 years. I also used another advanced word there, insidious. Insidious is something that is harmful, but it harms you more and more over time. It becomes increasingly more harmful over time.

So it's an insidious frame of mind, insidious way of thinking. So yeah, I rarely compare my appearance to others. I suppose I've just kind of made peace. I've accepted that it's not something I can easily change. I try to be as healthy as I can and that may improve my appearance. But I think it doesn't make any sense really to compare my appearance. That's just how I feel, you know.

I don't look like this person, so why would I worry about it? I guess. I don't know. I don't know. I try to be happy with how I look, even if I'm not the best looking person.

I also rarely compare my income or my possessions since I've worked very hard to be happy with what I have. It's not to say that I have the highest income or the best possessions, but I think there is a level of acceptance you can get there. And I've worked hard on that. When it comes to possessions, I think for me, it's been just having that really genuine appreciation for the things I have.

Like this t-shirt is getting probably about a year old now and it's getting a little bit faded. It's maybe not the best quality as it could be, as it once was. But I can look at it and appreciate how it keeps me warm when I'm cold. It protects my skin from the sun. And I can think back to all the nice memories we've had together, me and this t-shirt,

I don't know, but I can try my best to appreciate it. And that kind of stops me looking at other people and thinking, oh, his T-shirt is way better than mine, you know, being jealous of that or comparing their things to my things. Right. However, as I said earlier,

The biggest problem that I have is maybe comparing myself when it comes to language abilities. And I'm sure you can relate to this. You might be thinking, oh, he's only been speaking for one year, but is already way better than me. Or what? How can she speak English so well? She didn't live in the UK like I did for many years. That's not fair. What has she got that I haven't got? You feel jealous. You want to be like them, right?

And it's not a nice feeling. I'm sure we can all relate to this to some level. And the inspiration behind this episode is actually, I met someone recently who had only been learning Chinese for a few months and

I would say they were around my level. In some ways better than me, but in some ways worse than me. I could see there were gaps in both of our knowledge, but this person's level was comparable to my level after I've been learning for several years already. Of course, I went through a wave of emotions and I didn't feel that good. I kind of felt like I wasn't good enough. I felt inadequate.

But I eventually settled on, I eventually decided on the feeling of acceptance, right? And the way that I got to that feeling of acceptance is reminding myself of some important things. And this is a really, really powerful insight for me. And this is why I don't tend to get jealous of people's possessions or money. And

This is because comparison, it just doesn't make sense unless we want the whole package, unless we want everything about that person. It's really just not possible to take someone's skill with a language unless we also take

everything else, their mind, their life, their successes and failures, their family and friends and relationships and work, right? Because everything is connected. You cannot isolate, you cannot take out one part of a person and get jealous of that. Because in order to get that thing, that person also needed to have all those other things together. So it's very complex, but it

The more you think about it, the more it's just, it doesn't make sense to be jealous of one specific area of a person's life. They all come together. So, you know, you can think in other words, if I had all of those things, if I had this person's mind and upbringing, childhood, family, job, I would be in the same position. I would have their interests, their skills, their knowledge, their experiences and memories. I would have the same things.

So, perhaps here we could say one reason, I'm going to cope a little bit now, one reason why my Chinese may not be as good as other people is because I've also been focusing on two other languages. I'm trying to improve my Japanese, my Thai, and I'm also trying to work on my health and improve my fitness. I've got some travel holidays and stuff like that. I'm working on a business and a podcast, right?

So this other person may, you know, I don't know them that well, but maybe they're not doing all these things. Maybe they're only learning one language and their job is quite simple. Maybe they're unemployed. Actually, I don't know. But the point is, all of these things have to be taken into account. So I asked myself the question, would I give up all of those things I just said to improve my Chinese?

And of course the answer is no, right? So we have to kind of take all these things into account. We're not saying this stuff to make ourselves feel better. Like, okay, we are better than that other person because that's still a comparison. The purpose of this way of thinking is just to avoid the comparison altogether, right?

So this person's on their language learning journey. Their speed is individual to them. I'm on a different learning journey and they're not really comparable. We shouldn't really compare them, right? So for the rest of this episode today, I'm going to be giving examples of how we fall into this comparison trap, some advice on how to avoid it. And like I said before, some comparative structures, right?

Again, it may be easy for some people, but I think even so, the advice here might be worthwhile. So we have, we'll see how far we can get to. You know, I do like to talk, but we have eight altogether. I'll try to get to all of them, but if I see it's taking too long, I might speed up towards the end.

But okay, number one, as I just said, language skills. Let's stay on this topic for a bit longer. People often compare how fluent they are in a language, in English maybe, compared to other people. So here we can use the structure. Again, we're going to start simple and then get slightly harder as we go through. More adjective than. This is a fairly basic structure. I imagine you know this.

So she speaks English more fluently than me. This is an adverb, so it could be adverb or adjective. More fluently than me. She speaks more fluently than me. We're comparing she to me, her to me, right? So yeah, this is the basic way to compare two things. And yeah, I've already given my own personal view on this. Maybe I'll do that in the other ones coming up.

But I think, you know, I've given some advice on this already, but it's important to focus more on your own personal progress rather than how fast others are learning. Yeah, just remember, the more you practice, the better you'll become. We'll come back to that structure in a minute.

But yeah, I think just be really focused on your own journey and yourself and not really concern yourself with how other people are doing. Maybe you can learn from them, which is nice, but just understand that we're all different. So it's not so easy to compare. The next one, we'll move on to a new topic now, is physical appearance. This might be easy for someone like me where I might say,

he has more hair than I do. He has more hair than I do. I get jealous of that. But yeah, this is obviously very common. Looking at other people, looking at their looks, their body or their fitness level or muscles or whatever it is like that and not feeling good enough. So here's a sentence now. We could say he's twice as muscular as I am.

So here we've got twice or half. We can use both of them as adjective as. OK, so here we use as as. So when we use two as is as as we are either saying something is the same or more or less. Right. So I could say he is as muscular as me. That means we are the same as.

But if we add this word twice, that means double. He's twice as muscular as I am, or he's twice as muscular as me for short. So that means his muscularity, his muscle size is double my muscle size.

and I can get mad about that. In fact, I kind of thought that this morning. I went to the gym and I saw a guy with very big muscles and I kind of thought, yeah, he's got big muscles. I wonder how long he's been working out. I was slowly falling into that comparison trap, but I stopped myself before I went any further. So yeah, maybe you could think of some of your own sentence examples with this. Twice as much as or half as much as.

he weighs half as much as I do or his weight. How can I say this another way? He is half as heavy as me, which means he's lighter than me. He's half as heavy as me. So this emphasizes the how much or how much or little someone else has compared to you. So, yeah, when it comes to comparing appearance and bodies and fitness and stuff like that,

I think we first need to

develop an appreciation for our own bodies and kind of learn to like our bodies and one kind of specific way that i found is useful with this is through some mindful exercises the most common example might be yoga you know when many people find when they start doing yoga they learn to appreciate their bodies more and how their bodies help them move and get around in the day um

There's many things our bodies can help us do and having some gratitude for that is a really nice way to appreciate your body and not compare yourself to other people. So that's something really nice if we can do that. And

Also, I think understand that everyone is insecure about something. You know, sometimes you might see someone and think, wow, they are so beautiful. They're like an angel. They're perfect. I bet they're not insecure about anything. But then if you were to ask them, they'll definitely say something. Oh, I really hate my hair, my eyes. Maybe this eye is slightly bigger than this eye. And it's something that you will never have noticed if they didn't say it.

Yes, everyone is insecure about probably quite a lot of things about their bodies that other people wouldn't notice or maybe other people might find beautiful. I feel like that's quite a common thing, isn't it? You might say, oh, that's a really beautiful, I don't know, you've got really beautiful hair, your clothes are really beautiful, something like that. But then if you were to ask them, they might say, really? My hair is the thing I hate most about myself, right?

Yeah, so you never know what other people think of you. So even if you might want to compare yourself to another person's body, just be aware that they probably don't like their body either. No one is really that happy with how they look. It's a human thing and we have to work to try to improve that. So that's one idea I had on that one.

Let's move on to wealth and money. Of course, this is a huge one in a capitalist society, in a modern society where people compare their income from their work and also their

possessions because your possessions show your status. Who's got the biggest house? Who's got the most expensive car? That's a big one here in Thailand I've noticed is people show status with cars. They have these huge big cars that honestly are just way too big for the streets. I've also heard it's mostly about showing status. It's like, "Oh look how rich I am. I've got this car."

Meanwhile, I'm walking faster than they're driving. So is their car really that useful for them? Maybe that's another topic. So when it comes to comparatives, the structures here, we could use words like much or far, words like this to emphasise how big or small the difference is. So I could say he earns more than me.

To make it a little bit more advanced, he earns way more than me. He earns a lot more than me. Maybe he earns a bit more than me. He earns far more than me. There are many kind of words that have the same meaning here. Far, a lot, much. They're all the same in that case. So yeah, I...

Honestly, don't know. In the UK, you might know it. It's kind of a taboo topic. We don't often talk about money and income and finances compared to other cultures. I don't really know how much money my friends make. And I think that's quite nice. It's not really important because I think sometimes when you know something,

someone's income naturally it changes your opinion about them maybe you think about them a little bit differently perhaps and just not knowing their income is quite nice because whether you're a millionaire or you're just scraping by which means you're barely making enough money to survive you can be friends right money doesn't have to be uh something that uh separates people right

So yeah, he earns a lot more than me or she has a far bigger house than I do. And I think one of my pieces of advice for this, I could say personally, is learning to appreciate that bigger doesn't always mean better. There's two comparative structures there. Bigger is not always better. People often will show off with their big houses and expensive cars and

But to me, I'm just thinking how horrible that would be. I'm thinking, wow, for such a big house, you've got so many things to organise, so much to clean or so much to pay cleaners, even worse maybe. You've got so many costs and maintenance things to do on your expensive car. I would much prefer my life with a small apartment and no car at the moment anyway. That's my view. You can learn to appreciate that.

sometimes the things that people boast about is not the best thing. Maybe there's benefits of not having their way of life. Because in fact, sometimes people will...

buy these expensive things, and maybe they have to really try to show off about it to make themselves feel better. They've just spent all of their money on a new car, and maybe deep down they might feel it's not the best use of their money. They feel they wasted money. So therefore they have to keep talking about it all the time to try to make people jealous. Because if other people feel jealous, then maybe they will feel better about their

a foolish purchase. I'm not saying that's the case every time, but it could be sometimes. There's also another phrase which is 'more money, more problems'. So even if you don't have all the money that others do, there's benefits to that. I like to think that if I did get more money, if I were to be richer, I may not be as happy. I might be happier, but

Let's say I'm not like, who knows? We just don't know. So why worry about it? Why get jealous? Why compare? That's something that I try to remind myself as well. Okay. Halfway through now. Next one is career success kind of related to the status we spoke about before.

You might compare how far you've got in your career, in your job, to other people as well. I saw this online just this morning about someone who felt quite bad because they said they enjoyed their job, they like their work, they studied very hard for their job, but their friends make more money than they do at the same age. And that made them question whether they made the right choice.

I only read it quite quickly, but to me that seemed like they were just falling into that comparison trap. And I think the key here is that they said they were happy. So if you're happy, why does it matter what other people are earning? There will always be someone who earns more than you. So why should that make you feel less happy?

adequate in comparison. It doesn't really make sense the more that you think about it, right? This is where things get a little bit more advanced. Let's see if you know this one. So let me read this sentence for you. He's more successful than I'll ever be. No sooner had I got a promotion than I started comparing myself to my colleagues. So that's the key part. No sooner had I got a promotion than I started comparing myself.

So here we've got that word 'sooner', so it's like the comparative form of 'soon'. So 'no sooner'. Then we use the past perfect tense, quite advanced: 'no sooner had I got'. Right, but it's a little bit of inversion here. So this is really advanced. We're not saying 'I had got', 'no sooner had I got' a promotion. And then the second part we say 'than' and then the other thing that happens.

The meaning of this structure is it shows how one thing happens immediately, very quickly after another thing. No sooner had I got home than I saw the dog had peed on the carpet. So that just means like the dog peed right after I got home and there was nothing I could do about it. So I guess this is kind of like a good storytelling structure, really. It's really good for storytelling.

No sooner had I got home than I saw a problem had happened. Something like that. Quite advanced, but maybe for the more advanced learners out there, you can take that one away today. And yeah, going back to the topic again. So comparing your career success, what advice could I give here?

Well, no sooner could you compare your career success. I think I've messed that up. This is a very hard structure to make into a piece of advice. It's much easier for storytelling. Let me try and reword it to make it easier. The moment you start to compare yourself, the moment you will start to question, the same moment you'll start to question whether you're in the right career. I think one tip I can mention here is if you are comparing yourself to other people, you

First of all, ask yourself, would you be happier with their job? If you had their work, would it make you happier? If so, maybe that is a genuine feeling. Maybe it is something to let you know, OK, maybe I should consider changing my career then if I think theirs seem more appealing than mine.

But if it's about the money, it's always a bad idea to chase money. If you chase money, you'll never get it. Money will always elude you, will always avoid you. So I think chasing money is not the right idea. But being jealous of someone's career might be an indication that you might need to change. That is a genuine thing that could be true. But also think in reverse, like,

Is there anything about your own career that this person might envy they might want as well? And, you know, you can try to start to think about how others might view your career and how you might be making other people jealous or envious in some way. Right. So that's that's interesting to think about as well. You can reverse it on them.

For me, I've always had a goal personally to make my work as fun as I possibly can. That's really been one of my main goals. I've wanted to take control of my own work.

And I've tried to actively avoid comparing myself to other people. I suppose when I was younger, I did have this comparison feeling like, oh, this person has my dream job. And then just like I said just now, I thought, wait, if this person has my dream job, then what's stopping me from working towards that? You know, if this person did it, why can't I do it? So I guess that's still the journey that I'm on today as well.

Okay, next one now, social media. Such a big topic when it comes to comparison, comparison trap.

So people often compare their lives to the highlights that they see of others or that others share online. So that's a key word here, highlights. It's not their real life. It's just the best parts of their life that they have curated or chosen to display online. And that's really important to be aware of. That will relate to my tip in a minute.

So let's try to use that structure again. Her life on Instagram seems twice as exciting as my life. It seems way more exciting. Twice as adjective. I will never be as happy as she is. My life will never be as good as hers.

So here we've got 'as as' again to compare different things. But yeah, really that is my advice. So social media, it only shows the highlights. Everyone has bad days, but we don't post the bad days on Instagram or TikTok or whatever we use. We don't post them. So when you see people travelling around the world doing all these amazing things, it looks really good, but that's not the real picture.

A prime example of this is for me. I know I don't post on Instagram or social media too much, but I posted a little bit about my trip in Europe. And for my followers, they might have thought, wow, Michael's having an amazing time traveling over Europe, taking a little break from work. That sounds amazing. I wish I could do that. He's got such an amazing life.

But in reality, I felt quite lonely for most of the trip. I wasn't enjoying most of it. I enjoyed little bits, but not a big chunk of it. And I think that was it's not easy to show that on social media. You want to show the happy moments. But I think once you notice that in yourself, you also realize for other people, that's true as well.

And sometimes it may even be a correlation, a connection. When people go on holiday and they are posting every minute of every day what they're doing, then that probably means they're not having the best time, right? Because if they were really having a fun time, they wouldn't spend so much time on social media. That's what I tend to think anyway. When I travel, I probably post on Instagram posts.

you know, a couple of times a week, maybe, uh, maybe once a day maximum. But if you're posting the moment something happens, it probably means you're not having that much fun because you're not in the moment enjoying it. Right. So that's, that's important to realize.

One other really big topic, which could be a whole nother podcast, which I'm not qualified to talk about, is relationships. We might compare people's romantic relationships or maybe friendships as well and compare them to our own situation. So this could be maybe you're single and you're looking at someone who is in a relationship thinking, I wish I could have a girlfriend or boyfriend. They look so happy. Why can't I be like them?

And that's one option. The other is you might be in a relationship already and you're looking at someone else thinking, oh, this person is way better than my partner. They're more beautiful, more handsome. They're richer, more attractive. You know, all these things that are quite dangerous to think about in a relationship.

And yeah, there's different ways we can compare and not be content, not be happy with what we already have. You might even have this attitude like,

Hmm, I could just have one girlfriend or I could have 20 girlfriends. And that's got to be better because 20 is better than one, right? Yeah, maybe the more girlfriends I have, the happier I will be. Or we can shorten that. Here's the structure for this one. The more, the better. The more, the better.

So we can shorten things down and get rid of all the other stuff and just say E-R-E-R. And we use the at the beginning. The happier, the richer. So in a long way, the happier I am, the richer I will be.

You see this in quite a few expressions, like set expressions as well, like 'the more the merrier', 'the more the merrier'. That just means the more we have, the better it will be. So, can I bring my friend to the party tonight? Yeah, of course, the more the merrier. The more the better, in other words. How much sugar would you like in your tea? Ah, the sweeter the better.

We often use 'better' at the end. The bigger the better, the sweeter the better, the smaller the better. That's very common. So yeah, you might think, 'ooh, girlfriends? The more the better'. But that may not be true. Is 'more girlfriends, more problems' an expression? Maybe not.

Okay, for some people, maybe that works. But I think for most of us or many of us, having one person that we care about is going to work better. And rather than being jealous of someone else who might have 20 girlfriends, we can just be happy with what we have, right? So, of course, there are some situations where you might have to question whether you are in the right relationship. You know, not everyone is going to pick the right person. But I think for most cases, we need to focus more on...

our own relationships and what's the word nurturing them to nurture is to help something grow and get better and survive maybe rather than focusing on others and envying other relationships

So yeah, focus on your own and see if you can make your relationship with your partner or friend the best you possibly can rather than comparing yours to others. Okay, two more now to go. Next one is skills and talents. We spoke about a little bit already with language learning, but now it's just more generally. You might look at someone's ability to play the guitar or to sing or to run like sports

achievements and get jealous of that or envious of that. And this is kind of understandable because a lot of these things, especially with your body and fitness, you might be born with some specific skills. If you compare yourself to someone in, you know, a famous basketball player,

probably unless you're, you know, seven or eight feet tall, you're never going to be a famous basketball player. There's certain limitations to what we can do, right? So there is an element of acceptance in who we are and what we can do.

But in many cases, we can improve these and get better with these things. I think that would be my advice here. And I'm going to give this structure in my advice. And this is keep working to make yourself better and better.

So this is when we're using two comparative words together. And this gives the feeling that something is going, getting increasingly faster or it's getting increasingly more, like more and more, that kind of feeling more and more and more.

So we can say the car is driving fast. But if you want to say the car is getting increasingly fast, which means it starts at 20, then 30, then 40, then 50, we can say the car is getting faster and faster.

So, just use the word twice with an 'and' and that shows the change in what's happening as well. So yeah, keep working on your skills and make them better and better. Keep making them better because we can improve in many different ways and who knows, maybe the other person is comparing themselves to you. I often feel inadequate in many ways. I feel like I am not smart. I'm not as smart as other people.

and I should be smarter. But then maybe people look at me and they might think the same. They might think, wow, Michael speaks three languages. He must be really smart. And you know, the truth is I don't really speak many of them or any of them that well. I often joke about even my English is not so good, you know? So how many languages do you speak, Michael? Well, a little bit less than one, perhaps. Yeah.

But yeah, you know, maybe they might be envious of that. We just don't know how others think of us, right? So I guess this relates to the expression, the grass is always greener on the other side. You might have heard that before. You may even have it in your own language, which means what you don't have always seems better than what you do have. Really important thing to remember, I would say. Now let's go to the final one today, which is life milestones.

This is honestly not something that I relate to too much. I don't have this problem, but I hear many, many people do. And this is comparing life stages like marriage or having kids or buying a home, stuff like that. We could say, you know, the bigger the house they get, the more jealous I become. Or the more expensive their car, the more I compare myself to them.

So, this is kind of like what we said before, you know, the bigger the better, we're just expanding out the sentence where it shows the relationship between two things and how they're changing together, right? So, the bigger their house, the more I compare myself. So, as their house gets bigger, the comparison level gets higher as well, that means.

So this is a big problem, I would say. I think a lot of people do this. I guess for me, just naturally, it just doesn't come. This feeling of comparison here doesn't come naturally to me. So it's maybe harder for me to give advice for this one. But I think it's important to be aware that everyone's path is different.

We're not on the same journey and that's totally fine. And I guess it's just like any other point I've mentioned today is just focus more on building up your own life, living the best life possible. I know some people who have got very jealous when other people have had children before them, for example. I've never quite understood why, because even they themselves admitted that they weren't ready to have kids.

So I don't quite understand why would you be jealous of someone having kids when you yourself are not in a position to have kids. But yeah.

I guess if it's your dream for your whole life and someone else does your dream, I can kind of imagine. But again, I think this relates to my point earlier. I'm going to try to make it more relevant to me that maybe someone has moved to Japan. They're living in Japan and they have my dream life. I'm so envious. I really want the life that you have. It's so annoying. Why can't I have that life? And I guess I would have to think again. Well,

If I wanted to compare my life to yours, I'd have to compare everything. I'd have to also compare your relationship to your family, your work and all this other stuff that maybe I wouldn't want that stuff. Maybe I just want this aspect of living in Japan.

And if that's my realisation then I know that I can work a little bit harder on that one as well. So I guess in summary for all of these things, a lot of it comes down to just being really focused and content with what you have. It doesn't have to mean your stuff needs to be perfect. Kind of something I've struggled with before is I've always had the feeling that I want my things to be perfect. I need to have, you know, a perfect, perfect shoes that

are perfect for every situation and they don't have anything wrong with them. A shirt with no holes in even, that hasn't faded in the sun. But I'm trying more and more these days to be content with what I have. It is something you can practice doing and you don't need to buy more things to be happy.

think that's a nice realisation. So yeah, be content with what you have and understand that other people have problems too. You know, if you want someone else's life, understand that their life is not perfect. They may even want your life or someone else's life again.

So, yeah. Something I think about quite a lot and I think a lot of us might as well because it's a very common problem that humans face, isn't it? Okay, I guess I'll end it here but I'm not quite ending it because I do want to share a quote but I also want to say a quick thank you to some comments.

So these are comments from Spotify. You're welcome to leave a comment on Spotify. If you do, please also give me a five stars. That will mean the world to me. I'll be super happy if you can do that. Let me just say a quick thank you to some of you. So this one is from episode 287 from Nitinan, Nitinan, something like that.

or maybe Nita for short. So she says, hi, I'm Nita from Thailand. I like your story and your voice. It's easy to listen to and to practice the English language. So thank you, Nita Kopkenkab. Thank you very much. Appreciate your nice comment. And it's nice to know I'm helping people in Thailand as well.

Another one from episode 275 from Just Me, who said, I love the way of learning English and listening to an English podcast because it's useful for all of us. Glad you think so. Thank you for the comment. Let's do three more. They're very short. Three more. Gihad Ahmad said, thanks a lot. It's a really great episode on 274. Thank you.

266. Now going back a bit further, Maita, not quite sure how to pronounce your name, Maita, Maita, said from Buenos Aires, I recommend your podcast to my English students. Wow. I love it when teachers recommend the podcast. That means so much to me. Thank you very much. Maybe you can also tell them that Michael mispronounced your name as well. Hopefully it wasn't too bad.

And last one from Lanyakia from episode 225, who just said, excellent and helpful content. So thank you to all of you. That means a lot to me. I'm really glad that you are engaging with the episodes. Let's just go to a quick quote about comparison and maybe jealousy from Oliver James, who says,

Why are you trying so hard to fit in when you're born to stand out? So don't be afraid to be who you are. Be different and don't try to copy everyone else. Great way to end this episode. Thank you so much for listening or watching and I will see you in the next one. Goodbye.

You have been listening to the Level Up English podcast. If you would like to leave a question to be answered on a future episode, then please go to levelupenglish.school forward slash podcast. That's levelupenglish.school slash podcast. And I'll answer your question on a future episode. Thanks for listening.