EssayENIdeas
Not every opinion deserves a place in your life.
On other people’s expectations, unsolicited advice, and the responsibility to make your own decisions.
Benjamin Trinidad Segura
6 min read
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On other people’s expectations, unsolicited advice, and the responsibility to make your own decisions.
Benjamin Trinidad Segura
6 min read
About how you should live. Which decisions you should make. Which risks you’re allowed to take. Which dreams are realistic and which you’d be better off giving up.
Sometimes these opinions come from people close to us. Sometimes from people who barely know us. And sometimes from people who have never even tried to do what they’re advising us against.
And yet we listen to them.
Not necessarily because they’re right.
But because their opinion stirs something in us.
Maybe doubt. Maybe uncertainty. Maybe the fear of making a mistake.
And sometimes a single sentence is enough to make us question something we were sure of just yesterday.
But since when is another person’s conviction automatically an argument against our own?
People judge the world from their own perspective.
Based on their experiences, beliefs, fears, hopes, and sometimes their disappointments, too.
Someone who has failed once may consider a plan unrealistic.
Someone who values security highly may see risks as inherently negative.
Someone who doesn’t believe they can do certain things may find it hard to imagine that another person could.
That doesn’t automatically make these people wrong.
But it doesn’t automatically make their perspective right, either.
If someone says your idea won’t work, it may be a well-founded assessment.
But it may just as well mean that this person can’t imagine how it could work.
And there’s a huge difference between those two statements.
We should learn to recognize it.
There are people who want to help us.
People who want to share their experiences, protect us from mistakes, or draw our attention to something we might have overlooked.
Such people are valuable.
But there’s also advice that isn’t really advice at all.
But rather personal beliefs that someone else imposes on our lives.
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“That’s way too risky.”
“You’d be better off finding something secure.”
“Be realistic.”
Perhaps these statements are well-intentioned.
Perhaps they’re even based on legitimate concerns.
But there’s one question that’s surprisingly rarely asked:
Who is this decision actually supposed to be right for?
The person commenting on it?
Or the person who has to live with it afterward?
Because it’s easy to tell other people which path they should take.
It’s harder when you have to bear the consequences yourself.
Sometimes we spend a surprising amount of time justifying our decisions to other people.
We explain why we want to do something.
Why an idea excites us.
Why we want to take a different path.
And when the other person isn’t convinced, we try again.
With better arguments. More examples. Even more detailed explanations.
Until eventually, we stop thinking about the decision itself and start wondering how we can finally convince other people.
But why?
Why does someone else have to believe in our dream before we’re allowed to pursue it?
Why do we need approval for a decision whose consequences we’ll have to bear ourselves?
Of course, other people can help us see more clearly.
Of course, we can be wrong.
And naturally, we should be willing to question our convictions.
But we don’t have to win every argument to be allowed to follow our own path.
Sometimes people are allowed to disagree.
And we’re still allowed to carry on.
But there’s a danger here, too.
Because the idea of not letting other people’s opinions influence us can quickly turn into something else.
Into the conviction that we always know best what’s right.
That criticism only comes from people who don’t understand us.
That other people’s doubts are automatically a reflection of their own limitations.
But it’s not that simple.
Sometimes other people really do see something we’ve overlooked.
Sometimes we’re so convinced by an idea that we don’t want to recognize its weaknesses.
And sometimes the person who disagrees with us is precisely the one who could help us the most.
That’s why we should distinguish between two things:
Taking an opinion seriously and submitting to it.
We can listen without agreeing.
We can consider criticism without immediately abandoning our convictions.
We can reconsider our decisions without being ashamed that we made them in the first place.
And we can acknowledge that someone is right in their criticism without seeing ourselves as failures.
I find the idea that we should stop constantly arguing with our past particularly interesting.
How often do we think about what we could have done differently?
Which decision was wrong.
Which opportunity we missed.
Which person we shouldn’t have trusted.
Which path we perhaps should have taken.
In hindsight, a lot seems obvious.
We know the consequences.
We know which risks actually materialized.
We have information that wasn’t available to us at the time.
But that’s exactly what we often forget when we judge our past.
We judge past decisions using knowledge we couldn’t possibly have had when we made them.
That doesn’t mean every decision was right.
Nor does it mean we shouldn’t feel responsible for our mistakes.
But perhaps we should stop condemning our past selves for not already being who we are today.
We’re allowed to learn from our decisions.
We’re allowed to regret them.
We’re allowed to take responsibility and try to make things right.
But we can’t undo them.
And eventually, that leaves us with a different question:
How much longer do we want to argue with a past that can no longer give us an answer?
You can ask other people for advice.
You can take their experiences into account, take their criticism seriously, and let their perspectives inform your decisions.
Perhaps that will help you make better decisions.
Perhaps that will help you avoid mistakes.
But perhaps you’ll also realize that no one can say for certain which path is right for you.
And that’s exactly where a responsibility lies that no one can take off our shoulders.
Because other people can tell us what they would do.
They can explain what they would be afraid of.
They can even convince us that a decision might be wrong.
But they can’t live our lives for us.
They don’t have to wake up every morning with the thought that they never pursued a particular dream.
They don’t have to live with the question of what might have been possible.
Nor do they have to bear all the consequences if we decide to try anyway.
That’s why we should neither reject other people’s opinions outright nor accept them without question.
We should understand them.
Question them.
Put them in perspective.
And then decide for ourselves.
Perhaps we’ll make mistakes along the way.
Perhaps other people will even turn out to be right in the end.
But perhaps we’ll also achieve things no one thought possible.
Not because we never listened.
But because we learned to decide for ourselves which voices we want to follow.
Because not every opinion deserves a place in your life. But some deserve you to listen more closely.
And recognizing the difference might matter more than always being right.
Discussion
Disagreement is welcome. Disrespect isn’t.
Start the discussion with a thoughtful response.