It's time to stop comparing yourself to the average person's retirement plan. Your goals should be personalized, and the numbers may evolve over multiple decades. Concerning yourself with account balances can be a dangerous oversimplification. People often improve their outcomes by considering their personal circumstances and consistently following important rules over the years.

People often pay close attention to asset accumulation in retirement planning, which is understandable: You spend all of your working life building an investment account, and its balance is a convenient scoreboard. The more you have invested, the more financially prepared you feel for retirement. That's an intuitive approach, but it's not necessarily the most effective one.

Most people are better off zeroing in on the day-to-day aspects that they can control. You can't directly control your investment account balance. It's the cumulative effect of consistent savings and investment behaviors, and it merely represents an intermediate step between accumulating retirement money and distributing it.

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Source Fool.com