As usual, Epictetus nails it.
Smart fellows they are, he said, who pride themselves on those things that are not within our power. ‘I’m better than you,’ one says, ‘because I own plenty of land while you’re half-dead with hunger.’ Another says, ‘I’m of consular rank,’ and another, ‘I’m a procurator,’ and another, ‘I have good thick hair.’ And yet one horse doesn’t say to another, ‘I’m better than you because I have plenty of fodder, and plenty of barley, and bridles of gold, and richly worked saddles,’ but rather it says, ‘I can run faster than you.’ And every creature is better or worse in so far as it is made so by its own specific virtue or vice. Can it be, then, that man is the only creature to have no specific virtue, so that he has to look instead to his hair, and his clothes, and his forebears?
Epictetus, Fragments, 18
It’s easy to see others doing this. Watch for it in yourself.
That last sentence cuts deeply:
Can it be, then, that man is the only creature to have no specific virtue, so that he has to look instead to his hair, and his clothes, and his forebears?
Stand on your own virtue, on things within your control. On the inside man.