EssayENIdeas
Other people’s opinions are not your yardstick.
Why we give people the power to determine our decisions, even though they don’t have to live with the consequences.
Benjamin Trinidad Segura
6 min read
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Why we give people the power to determine our decisions, even though they don’t have to live with the consequences.
Benjamin Trinidad Segura
6 min read
There are people whose opinions matter more to us than our own.
Sometimes we barely know these people. Sometimes we’ve known them our whole lives.
And sometimes, just imagining what someone might think of us is enough to stop us from doing something.
We don’t voice an idea.
We don’t apply for a job because we think we’re not good enough.
We don’t start a business because others might laugh at us.
We don’t show who we really are because we’re afraid of being judged for it.
Not necessarily because we’re convinced ourselves that our decisions would be wrong.
But because we’re afraid others might think they’re wrong.
In the process, we overlook something crucial:
The people whose judgment we fear don’t have to live with the consequences of the decisions we didn’t make.
We do.
Humans are social beings.
We want to belong. To be accepted. To be understood.
So it’s not without reason that other people’s opinions matter to us.
They help us make sense of our behavior, recognize mistakes, and understand different perspectives.
But this guidance becomes problematic when it turns into dependence.
When we stop asking whether a decision is right for us and ask only how others might react to it.
When we start judging our options by how little they leave us open to criticism.
And when, eventually, we lead a life that reflects our surroundings’ expectations more than our own convictions.
Then we may have achieved one thing:
We avoid criticism.
But at what cost?
Imagine you want to start a business.
You tell someone about it.
The response?
“It won’t work anyway.”
Maybe that person is right.
Maybe you’ve overlooked significant risks. Maybe your business model isn’t viable. Maybe you really are missing something crucial.
But maybe that person is simply afraid of change.
Maybe they would never start a business themselves.
Maybe they see every risk as a mistake, by default.
Or maybe they simply can’t imagine your venture working.
That doesn’t mean their opinion is worthless.
It simply means that an opinion doesn’t automatically become the truth just because someone states it with confidence.
That’s why we should learn to distinguish between a well-founded assessment and a personal belief.
Someone can be convinced that something won’t work without actually knowing whether it can work.
And someone can criticize us even though they would never be willing to take the same step themselves.
They’re entitled to both.
The only question that matters is:
Why should their personal limit automatically become ours?
Why should another person’s personal limit automatically become ours?
What seems impossible to one person may seem obvious to another.
What one person considers irresponsible, another sees as a necessary risk.
What sounds like grandiosity to one person may be a realistic goal to another.
Our experiences shape our ideas about what’s possible.
And that’s true for us just as much as it is for the people who judge us.
That’s why we should be careful about adopting other people’s beliefs as our own without examining them.
Not everyone who advises us against something wants to hold us back.
Some people genuinely want to protect us.
Others want to stop us from making the mistakes they made themselves.
And still others project their own fears onto our decisions without even realizing it.
Good intentions don’t automatically make an assessment correct.
Likewise, a lack of experience doesn’t automatically make an opinion wrong.
What matters is whether we understand what it’s based on.
It would be easy to conclude from this that we shouldn’t care about other people’s opinions at all.
But would that really be wise?
We need people who disagree with us.
People who question our ideas.
People who notice things we ourselves overlook.
Sometimes the criticism we least want to hear is precisely the kind that helps us the most.
The difference lies in what we do with it afterward.
We can take criticism seriously without submitting to it unconditionally.
We can listen without automatically agreeing.
We can question our decisions without immediately abandoning them.
And we can acknowledge that someone disagrees without concluding that we must be wrong.
Someone else’s opinion can broaden our perspective. It doesn’t have to define our identity.
Perhaps the real problem runs a little deeper.
How often do we even question where our ideas about life come from?
What does success mean to us?
What does security mean?
What does it mean to make something of your life?
And who taught us what the answers to those questions should look like?
Our parents?
Our friends?
Our partners?
The society we grew up in?
Perhaps we’re pursuing goals we never consciously chose for ourselves.
Perhaps we think things are impossible because someone once told us they were.
Perhaps we’ve learned to see certain decisions as sensible and others as irresponsible without ever questioning that distinction.
Of course, our convictions don’t develop independently of our surroundings.
Nor do they need to.
But there’s a difference between adopting a belief and consciously choosing it.
Just because we’ve believed something for a long time doesn’t mean we ever chose it for ourselves.
Perhaps we’d try things more often.
Perhaps we’d apply for jobs whose requirements we don’t fully meet.
Perhaps we’d finally pursue the idea we’ve been thinking about for years.
Perhaps we’d tell people how we really feel.
Perhaps we’d admit more often that we don’t know something.
Or that we want something others don’t understand.
Of course, we could fail.
Of course, other people might laugh at us.
And of course, we could make decisions that, in hindsight, turn out to be wrong.
But all of that can happen even when we’re only trying to meet other people’s expectations.
The difference?
In one case, we made the decision ourselves.
In the other, we may have left the decision to people who didn’t even know how much influence they had over us.
You can fail when you follow your own path. But you can also fail when you only try to meet other people’s expectations. Which kind of failure would you be more willing to accept?
Perhaps we don’t need to learn to ignore other people’s opinions at all.
Perhaps, instead, we need to learn to give them their proper place.
Not every criticism is an attack.
Not every compliment is affirmation.
Not every doubt is justified.
And not every belief we’ve carried with us for years originally came from us.
That’s why it’s sometimes worth pausing and asking:
Do I really not want this?
Or am I just afraid of what others might think about it?
Is this really my limit?
Or did I adopt someone else’s limit at some point?
We’ll never be able to fully control what other people think of us.
And perhaps we don’t need to.
Because in the end, it’s not about leading a life that no one can criticize.
It’s about leading one we can stand behind ourselves.
Other people’s opinions can be part of your decision.
But they shouldn’t decide what kind of life you lead.
Discussion
Disagreement is welcome. Disrespect isn’t.
Start the discussion with a thoughtful response.