Follow your own path, cliché but true

We hear this everywhere. It is a cliché, but you may be like me: someone who knew about it but never actually understood it. It is not a hard concept, yet somehow I managed not to understand it.

If you see your friend or anyone else achieve something, like (a common example) getting their first car, you will most likely feel like you need to catch up or that you are being left behind. That feeling is probably false. Here is why.

Everyone is on their own path. Say the person who got the car worked hard from the age of sixteen and could not focus on school. They simply had different priorities, and their path included the car at that point. You do not yet have the car on your path. You finish school, then you work for a year, and then you buy the car. It is not fair to compare yourself to someone else in an area you did not prioritize. It simply makes no sense. You will also manage to achieve that same thing, just a little later, because you prioritized other things.