Nobody decided that your mates are the measure of anything. It just got passed down like a bad tradition and everyone accepted it.
Your aunty at the Christmas gathering is not measuring you against yourself. She is measuring you against Tobi from down the street who just bought a Corolla. She has never asked Tobi what Tobi sacrificed to get that car. She has never asked if Tobi is happy. The car is visible. The car is the benchmark.
That is the problem. We benchmark what we can see.
And what we can see is always filtered. You see the car. You do not see the loan. You see the wedding. You do not see that two people who did not like each other very much rushed to an altar because the pressure became unbearable. You see the job title. You do not see that someone is dying slowly in a career they never wanted, every day, at a desk that feels like a sentence.
The people being held up as your benchmark are running their own race in quiet crisis.
Nobody decided that your mates are the measure of anything. It just got passed down like a bad tradition and everyone accepted it.
1. The benchmark assumes you started from the same place.
You did not. You know you did not. The person your family is comparing you to may have had a father who had connections, a mother who paid school fees without drama, a family that never had to choose between feeding and fees. You may have had none of that.
Two people cannot run the same race if one started two kilometres behind.
When SAP hit in the 1980s, it did not hit every family the same way. Some families lost businesses that were never recovered. Some children spent the 90s watching their parents rebuild from zero. That rebuilding does not disappear when those children become adults. It compounds. The gap that opened in one generation does not close simply because the next generation starts working. It takes time. It takes patience. And it certainly cannot be fixed by chasing whatever your mate is doing just to satisfy an auntie who has no idea what you are dealing with.
2. The benchmark assumes you want the same things.
This one is harder to say out loud in a Nigerian family gathering but it needs to be said. Not everyone wants what the culture has decided everyone should want.
Not everyone wants to own a car at 27. Some people would rather build something that matters and take public transport for three more years. Not everyone wants to get married in their late twenties. Some people are not done figuring out who they are yet. Not everyone wants that job at a multinational with the good title and the pension plan. Some people are trying to build something of their own and the comparing to someone else who took a different road is actively harmful to that process.
Nobody is going to ask you what you actually want at that gathering. They are going to tell you what you should want. And then they are going to point to someone who has it as proof that it is possible.
You are not that person. You do not have to be that person.
3. The benchmark assumes you are running the same race.
Some people are in a sprint. They want visible results fast and they are willing to make trade-offs to get them. There is nothing wrong with that. But some people are in a marathon. They are building something that takes longer. They are compounding quietly. They are doing work that will not show up in a way that satisfies the Christmas gathering crowd for another five or ten years.
Pulling a marathon runner into a sprint comparison is not motivation. It is sabotage.
The most dangerous thing the “your mates” pressure does is push people into decisions they are not ready for. It pushes people into marriages that were not right but the timeline demanded it. It pushes people into businesses that were rushed because someone had to show results. It pushes people into debts they cannot afford because the car had to happen now. And then when those decisions unravel, the same aunty is not there to help you unravel them. She has moved on to the next comparison.
Pulling a marathon runner into a sprint comparison is not motivation. It is sabotage.
The Nigerian version of success has a very narrow visual definition. Big car. Big wedding. Big house. Big title. Everything else — the building, the learning, the failing and rebuilding, the quiet compounding — is invisible to this definition. It does not exist. If it cannot be announced at an owanbe party, it does not count.
This is why so many talented people abandon what they are actually good at to chase the visible version of success. Because the pressure is not just from family. It is baked into the culture itself. Prosperity gospel from the pulpit. Chieftaincy titles for the rich. The entire social architecture is designed to reward visibility, not depth.
So people perform. They borrow to perform. They perform at the expense of the actual work.
And then we wonder why so many promising things never reach their potential.
The measurement was wrong from the start. Your mates are not your benchmark. They never were. The only legitimate benchmark is who you were yesterday versus who you are today. That comparison is uncomfortable because it requires honesty about yourself that the “your mates” version does not. But it is the only one that leads anywhere real.
The only legitimate benchmark is who you were yesterday versus who you are today.
Let your mates do what your mates are doing. Wish them well. Mean it. And then go back to your own work. The race you are running is yours. Nobody else can run it for you, and nobody else’s pace is relevant to you finishing it well.