Episode 29: Whose Opinions? Yours?

I'm not very good at promoting myself, like getting out there onto platforms and touting
the things that I do or, you know, getting my name out there and all that kind of stuff.
In my assessment of this, it's not that I'm afraid of being judged necessarily.
That doesn't bother me so much.
It doesn't bother me the idea that people place judgments on me or the things that I
say.
Everyone places judgments on, well, essentially everything in life.
So that doesn't, it's not that.
What bothers me is the idea of being misunderstood.
I find that if you put out your opinion, I tend to find that I'm being very careful about
how I word things because I don't want it to be misunderstood.
Because I don't, again, I don't mind being judged, but I, I don't want to be judged on
incorrect information necessarily.
So recently I saw sort of a helpful quote of some sort.
And the gist of it was, I think it went, stop worrying about the judgment of people whose
opinions you wouldn't ask for.
So the general idea being, if you are going through something in life or you have something
that you're, uh, that you need other people's input on, the people, the only people you should
be worried about what they think is really the people who you would proactively reach
out to for an opinion as opposed to whatever's out there in the world.
I thought this was kind of interesting.
I think it was kind of, I guess, empowering is a certain word to it.
It, it, it rung true to me, this idea that if you're not, if you're not going to seek out
someone's opinion, then it's kind of like, who cares what they think anyway?
If they're going to, it's like an unsolicited piece of advice, whether it be positive or negative.
I then saw another thing or, or actually I was listening to another thing where the person
speaking, uh, their point was, it was kind of that old, oh, what would the younger version
of me think?
So the idea being, you know, if the younger version of myself saw me now, would they be
proud of me or not?
Would they be happy with where their life is headed?
And I found that these two pieces of, of, I don't know, wisdom or two pieces of these
two random truisms.
I don't know.
Uh, they, they have, they, they blend together.
Interestingly, the more I thought about it, if you take it, if you're willing to accept that
you shouldn't worry about what people think, whose opinions you wouldn't seek out.
But then on the other hand, you have this idea of, oh, what would the younger version,
like let's just say the 18 year old version of me, what would they think?
It raises the question, is the 18 year old version of myself, and I'm just picking on 18 because
I think that's what the person was saying, is the 18 year old version of myself, someone
whose opinion I would seek out?
Like if I had a challenging problem or just wanted input on something important, is the
18 year old version of myself, someone I would ask, ask that of?
Would I, would I, would I seek that, that version of myself's input?
I think this has a few facets to it.
First of all, I think we look, we, we have that thought of, oh, what would, what would the
younger version of myself think, or would the younger version of myself be proud of me
or whatever?
Because the younger version of yourself, at least if you're comparing, you know, an 18 year
old version of yourself versus say a 30 or 40 year old version of yourself, most likely
the 18 year old version of yourself was a more idealized version or, or had, had a stronger,
had a more idealized perspective on the future of where things would go.
You know, you, you might at that time in your life be thinking, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna
accomplish X, Y, and Z.
And I'm gonna, you know, I mean, whatever your kind of life goal is.
I'm gonna have a family and I'm gonna, you know, make a million dollars or like, whatever
your goals are.
I'm not saying that those were my goals, but whatever your goals are.
And then, but part of life is sort of rolling with it as it comes at you because you don't
necessarily always get to decide the exact course.
And hopefully, hopefully, if you've done things well, you have maybe achieved more of your goals
than not, or you've at least achieved some of them.
But you've probably also done things that you're not proud of.
You've probably made choices that maybe you wonder what the other choice might have been like.
Maybe you've made choices that are in direct conflict, even if you don't look at them and
say, oh, I wonder what path B would have been like.
Maybe you still have made choices, though, that are in direct conflict with whatever that 18-year-old
idealized version of yourself, or, you know, the 18-year-old version of yourself who believes
in sort of the ideal outcome of the rest of things.
Maybe it was in direct conflict with what that person would have thought.
But maybe it's a choice that these days you're proud of, and you look back and think, well,
with my experience, I know that this was the right choice.
That version of myself couldn't have possibly known that.
There are many psychological phenomenons and research tied to these concepts.
And there's some interesting stuff.
Some of this comes down to things like the discrepancy between your actual self and your
idealized self.
Some of it comes down to themes of nostalgia and how looking back always feels often, well,
I shouldn't say always, but often feels like sort of rose-colored glasses, simpler time,
all that kind of stuff.
So you think back to, oh, who was I as an 18-year-old or a 16-year-old or a 14-year-old
or whatever time period you're thinking about with this.
And you think, oh, that person, that person was so much more innocent and their goals and dreams.
Implicitly inside of all this is this idea that somehow their goals were more important
than yours now.
And I think that's the crux of why I find this interesting.
Because you really got to ask, would you seek out that person's opinions?
You have 10, 20, however many, 30 years of living and experience piled on top of what that person knew.
So can their viewpoint still be of any value?
Were their goals inherently misaligned with where you ended up just because they couldn't
possibly have known?
If so, why is looking back at that person, why judge yourself against that at all?
Why even think of these thoughts?
But I think many people do.
Oh, the younger me had different goals.
I ended up over here.
Or, and then there's a flip side of the coin, of course.
I'm sure there are plenty of people.
I'm not one of them, but there are plenty of people, I'm sure, who had a set of goals
at 18 and they carried them through.
They did, they had five goals and they hit all five and now they're there.
Are, have they, have those people found that that was a good path to take?
I personally know, I could think off the top of my head of at least two people who followed
that sort of path, who had a series of goals at 18.
They knocked through every one of them, got to the end of that line and then looked around
and said, this wasn't really what I thought it was going to be.
Because in some ways they were following for 10, 15 years, the advice of an 18 year old.
And is that a person you should be judging yourself by?
I have no conclusion here, really.
I just think it's an interesting thought experiment.
The idea of layering, you know, if you wouldn't care about the opinion of a random, a random
teenager, is that any less or more valuable than the random opinion of yourself at that
same age?
And why do we put so much more weight on one compared to the other?
Let alone if you don't care about the opinion or the input of some random person with much
more life experience, you know, a 40, 50, 60 year old who has lived.
And if you don't care about their opinion, shouldn't that almost inherently mean that the opinion
of yourself 30 years prior really doesn't hold much weight?
I'd be curious to hear about anyone's thoughts on this.
I just thought it was kind of an interesting dichotomy of ideas.
One that, you know, really kind of conflicts, they conflict with one another, at least in
my head.
Where on the one hand, I definitely wouldn't care all that much about some random person's
opinion, or at least I know I shouldn't, compared to, you know, looking back on some of my goals
from when I was much younger and wondering if I went down the right path.
I'd love to hear your opinions on this or if you've ever, if you have any expanded thought
on the topic.