The real poison in comparison isn't envy—it's that you're measuring yourself against someone else's highlight reel, someone else's starting point, someone else's entirely different set of circumstances. Gates is suggesting something sharper than mere self-acceptance; he's saying that comparison is actually *beneath* you, that it diminishes your own particular gifts by treating them as subordinate to a yardstick they were never meant to meet. A teenager comparing her ambitions to a billionaire's portfolio, or a writer measuring her prose against Hemingway's, isn't failing to reach excellence—she's failing to ask what excellence looks like *for her*. The insult isn't to Gates or Hemingway; it's to the singular, unrepeatable person you actually are.