Be Selective About Opinions
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As you get older, you have to become aggressively selective about whose advice you let into your head.
Early in our lives, we’re all standing on the same platform. We’re taking the same classes, applying for the same entry-level roles, and following the same “best practices.” The diving board is short. If someone jumps, the board barely flexes. Their experience is almost identical to yours, so their advice is high-signal.
But as the years pass, that board starts to extend. Infinitely.
The further you go, the longer your board becomes.
The variance in lived experience can be measured by the flex of the board when someone jumps. The longer the board, the larger the flex, and therefore the lower the chance that someone’s opinions or advice should be taken seriously. Here is why you should become increasingly immune to the opinions of others:
1. Life paths diverge exponentially: Up to your 20s, the “standard” path is a crowded highway. By your 30s and 40s, one person is climbing the ladder at a legacy firm, another is a solo-founder, and another is prioritizing different life goals entirely. The standard path dissolves. If someone is optimizing for safety while you are optimizing for autonomy, their “wise” advice is actually just a projection of their own constraints.
2. Context Shrinks: The subset of people whose advice actually pertains to your specific situation continues to shrink every year. Most people give advice based on their risk tolerance, their financial obligations, and their fears. Unless they are standing on a diving board of similar length and trajectory, their lived experience is likely irrelevant to your current reality.
People tend to care what others think of them, but the reality is that every year you should become more and more immune to others’ opinions.
It’s simple physics. As your board expands, the “flex” from outside opinions becomes too volatile to be useful and the chances that their opinion is relevant and hold weight continuously decreases. When you realize that no one else has the data for your specific situation, you stop looking for the opinion and validation of 99.99% of other people.
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Poor analogy