Intro

I was in a Slack huddle with my boss. I’ll skip all the unimportant details, but we were essentially working on something that I asked for help with, and we disagreed with a lot of the changes I made. I genuinely agreed with a lot of the points he made, but the dialogue started to sound unbearably sycophantic.

So, he gave me an important and warranted lecture.

This is what he said:

“There’s something about big decisions you will learn throughout your career and your life. When you are the one who lives with the outcome, you should make the call. Fuck everyone else. When you are the one who sits with the successes, the failures, and all the “in betweens,” you make the call…. That’s whether you study for a test, study abroad, vs taking an internship, whatever, it’s all of it.

The point I’m making is that what I am telling you is my perspective, and I could be wrong. And if I am wrong or if I am right: You live with it. You make the call. I want you to do what you believe is best. I am just giving you what I see.”

I am sure that in the back of my mind, I knew this. But I never really emphasized its importance until someone finally drilled it into the forefront of my perspective. Now, this lesson and this philosophy keep coming back up.

There seems to be a lot of nuance in this seemingly small, obvious, and insignificant idea. So throughout this blog, I’ll share the complexities of how this lesson prompted me to start thinking about a large variety of different things to which this applies.

The importance of context

This general idea came up again in a reel I saw. In a podcast with Chungin Lee, the CEO of Cluely, he quoted Sam Altman saying, “The way I got here is largely by not listening to anyone else around me. Generally, I think everyone else in the world is wrong except you; you are the only person that is correct.” In that context alone, it is, of course, extremely controversial and even wrong, but I think this next part saves his point:

“Nobody knows your life the way that you do. You make better decisions than you think.”

Now I don’t know exactly what Roy meant by this. Perhaps this is truly his ego talking, and perhaps Sam Altman's as well. However, this doesn’t mean that the point he wanted to convey is completely meaningless.

When I read and hear things like this, in a coincidental way, I am the one who makes the final decision on how I want the information I consume to affect my life; I am the one who decides how I want to interpret it.

So the biggest takeaway I found in this clip is this: “Nobody knows your life the way that you do. You make better decisions than you think.”

No one has the full context of your life the way that you do. That is a fact. So you have to be the one to make the final decision, not only because it is the most informed, but because that responsibility isn’t fair to put on someone else—no matter how easy it is to do so.

This, in a way, largely relates to AI right now. The reason why humans still have superior decision-making capabilities over these large LLMs is that they don’t have all the context. The token window is just not large enough yet to consider everything and create the most informed decision.

Treat your life the same way. You can open up all you want to the smartest person you know in your life, tell them everything about you, everything about your situation, and in the end, the most informed decision would still be the one that you make.

Be confident in that. Know that “you make better decisions than you think.”

Here is the link to the exact video I am referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaBvCpkjkYw

The importance of differing perspectives

It isn’t as simple as just plugging your ears and listening to what your heart desires.

It is important to realize that no matter how “informed” your decisions are, a large part of the noise that gets in the way of clarity in making the right decision are your emotions, and in some way, the “too much” context.

Let me explain. The first reason is easy. Emotions cloud judgment. I genuinely believe that nearly 50% of human decisions are driven by emotions. Emotions are subliminal, and I believe it's best to overestimate their effects rather than underestimate them.

Essentially, my point is that you can never know how much your emotions are swaying your decision, and an outside perspective can help with that emotional bias.

This next reason is somewhat abstract and may be difficult for me to explain. But the best way I can convey it is that with all the context that you hold, you may find yourselves placing too much weight/emphasis on a specific detail of the vast array of context that you have. Some things should really not weigh that much into a decision that you make, yet you still find yourself fixating on a specific detail that is swaying your decision too far in one direction.

But all of this goes to show that it is still important to explore outside perspectives. But this is only productive if you know how easily swayed you are in making decisions, and it all still boils down to YOU making the final call.

The importance of knowing yourself

You can listen to outside perspectives too much. As I am writing this, it feels like I just sound like a rambling person who can’t make up his mind. But regardless, there is a fine balance between conviction and ignorance.

The nuance here is that “too much” is different for each person. If you are the type of person who usually listens too much to others, and aren’t always entirely sure of yourself when you make a decision, it may be best to listen to only 1-2 closely trusted people.

If you have the fortitude to INTERNALLY guard your decision regardless of what others say, feel free to open up the decision circle to include more perspectives.

Again, it’s all about the balance between diverse thought—extremely important—and making the most informed decision with the most context, also extremely important.

Why this is hard to follow

When it comes to advice like this, I believe it is always crucial to understand the failure point as to why something is hard to actually carry out in practice.

For example, the advice “workout and become healthier” is very good advice; the failure point is in the inertia of changing habits, the money spent on a gym membership, the time commitment in doing so, along with a whole plethora of other things.

In this case. I believe this advice is extremely hard to carry out in practice because, for the longest time, as a society, I believe we have over-emphasized the importance of listening to others. Not just in a social media way, but in the way we have been raised since we were kids.

We have always been taught to listen to adults, parents, and teachers, which is largely good advice to have. But as a society, we have never officially found a way to grow out of that “always listen to others” state of mind. When we were kids, they had more context than us. But when do we self-actualize into thinking on our own? It is never explicit, never clear, and never intentional. It always comes to the point in school at which adults start saying, “You’re gonna be on your own now, it’s time you start making your own decisions.”

Understanding that context is the first important thing to consider in why this advice is hard to follow. The first 20 years of our lives are other people knowing more than us, and us having to listen to them. We don’t have enough practice in doing otherwise.

The other failure point in listening to his advice is common to many other failure points in other advice: the intrinsic human nature to follow the path of least resistance. I’ll deep dive into that in another blog post, but essentially, it is far easier to have someone else decide for you than to have to do it yourself.

Someone else making a decision means you don’t have to think as much about it, and offload that effort to someone else. Now, this issue of “off-loading thinking” has only grown larger with the growth of large AI companies. Another thing to consider is if someone else decides for you, then you can trick yourself into thinking that a bad outcome is everyone else’s fault but yourself.

How it started changing how I behaved

I am a firm believer that thinking is useless unless it creates a tangible difference. It is not enough to just think about something if no action comes out of it.

But essentially, this advice has made me more independent. Moving forward, whenever a big decision is to be made, I’ve stopped instinctively running to everyone in my life to gain their input. I constructed and fortified my own thoughts before letting others change them. In a way, it kinda works like the “Wisdom of the Crowd” effect and Solomon Asch’s Conformity Experiments.

Main Takeaway

You need to be the main influence in the decisions that you make for your own life. Society has created us to naturally shy away from doing it, and it creates an even greater need to be aware of it.

When you listen to advice, filter it through your own experiences, context, and needs. If this is something you need to hear right now, then listen to it. If it isn’t, then ignore it. Don’t let me think for you. You live with it.