I can't claim that he did or did not, I quoted him simply as I first heard it from him in this form. And it's not really important who come up with the idea first, in some way it is really an obvious thing, but we all forget about it too often. With the rise of Internet we stopped comparing ourselves with people around us locally, instead now you compare yourself with the whole damn planet. Instead of competing with few hundreds or thousands, you've now set yourself against billions of people - and that's a recipe for depression.
The internet is sort of like a local neighborhood in that regard, it's just that your neighbor next door is The World's Biggest Genius in [whatever your passion is] and down the road there's a few more contenders.
Now you could look at others too but when everyone around you talks about the same few people over and over, it's hard not to think that "unless I'm as good as them, I don't matter".
