Your Life Is Not a Group Decision

There are some decisions in life that become surprisingly crowded. You decide you want to start a business, leave a secure job, move somewhere new, change career, go back to university or pursue something that will require a few years of sacrifice, and suddenly everybody has an opinion.

Often, those opinions come from people who genuinely care about you. They can see the risk, the uncertainty and everything that could go wrong, and they want to protect you from it. The difficulty is that the safest version of your life isn’t necessarily the version you want to live.

There are people who would never consider giving up a reliable salary to build a business. They don’t want to spend evenings working, worry about whether there is enough money to cover payroll or accept that their income might be unpredictable while they build something. They would rather work for somebody else, finish at a reasonable time and know what will arrive in their bank account at the end of the month.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that life. There is also nothing wrong with knowing that it isn’t the life for you.

Other people advise you from their appetite for risk

When we ask people for advice, we sometimes forget that they aren’t assessing our decision objectively. They are imagining how they would feel if they were making it.

Tell somebody who values security that you’re thinking about leaving a well-paid job to start a business and they may immediately see everything you could lose. Tell an entrepreneur the same thing and they may immediately start asking about the opportunity.

Neither response is necessarily right or wrong. Both are influenced by the person giving the advice.

The same happens with countless other decisions. Somebody who has lived in the same town their entire life may struggle to understand why you want to move across the world. A person who prioritises financial security may think taking a lower salary for a more fulfilling career is ridiculous. Somebody who loves a predictable routine may look at your constantly changing life and wonder why you would voluntarily choose that much uncertainty.

Advice can be incredibly valuable, but it helps to remember that people often advise us towards the life that would make them comfortable. You are the one who has to decide whether that life would make you happy.

Building something often requires sacrifices other people wouldn’t make

There is a particularly strange period when you’re building a business because the sacrifice usually arrives before the evidence that it was worthwhile.

People see you working late, turning down plans, reinvesting money, worrying about cash flow and spending weekends doing things an employee might reasonably leave until Monday. From the outside, it can look like you’ve created an incredibly stressful job for yourself. Sometimes you might wonder the same thing.

The potential reward sits somewhere in the future. You might be working towards greater freedom, financial independence, creating jobs, building something you can eventually sell or simply having control over the direction of your own working life. None of that is guaranteed, and there may be years when the sacrifice is considerably more visible than the reward.

That is why entrepreneurship can be so difficult to explain to somebody who doesn’t want it. They see what you’re giving up. You see what you’re trying to build. You don’t need them to want the destination in order for it to be worth the journey to you.

Not everybody needs to understand the sacrifice

One of the mistakes we can make is assuming that if we explain our ambition clearly enough, everybody will eventually understand why we’re prepared to make sacrifices for it. They might not.

Somebody may genuinely believe you would be happier working fewer hours for somebody else. They may think the pressure isn’t worth it, that you’re taking unnecessary risks or that you should be satisfied with what you already have.

They may even be right about what would make them happier. The important distinction is that they aren’t living your life. If you know why you’re doing something, understand the risks and are willing to accept the consequences if it doesn’t work, you don’t necessarily need everybody around you to arrive at the same conclusion.

Sometimes the only person who truly needs to understand the sacrifice is the person making it.

Listen to advice without handing over the decision

None of this means ignoring people who disagree with you. There is a dangerous version of “follow your dreams” advice that suggests anybody questioning your decisions is simply negative, jealous or frightened by your ambition. That’s nonsense. Sometimes the person questioning you can see a problem you’ve missed.

Good advice can save us from expensive mistakes. The challenge is learning how to listen without automatically obeying.

Ask whether the person has relevant experience. Consider whether they’re identifying a genuine risk or simply expressing their own discomfort with uncertainty. Look at the evidence. Challenge your assumptions and be prepared to change your mind if somebody raises something you hadn’t considered.

Then make your decision. Taking somebody’s advice seriously doesn’t mean they get the final say.

Some decisions do affect other people

“It’s my life” can become an excuse for selfishness if we aren’t careful.

If your choices materially affect a partner, children, business partner or somebody who depends upon you, their needs deserve serious consideration. Deciding to invest the family savings into a business is very different from deciding how to spend your own Saturday afternoon.

Leadership and adulthood both involve responsibilities that mean we cannot behave as though our choices exist in isolation. But considering somebody else isn’t the same as surrendering your entire future to their preferences.

There are decisions that require discussion, compromise and sometimes agreement. There are others where the people around you are entitled to an opinion but not necessarily a vote. Knowing the difference matters.

You don’t need a committee for every change

Some people become stuck because they keep consulting.

They ask their partner, parents, siblings, friends, colleagues and somebody they met at a networking event. Every conversation introduces another perspective, another potential problem and another reason to wait. Eventually, they become so busy gathering opinions that they never actually make the decision. There comes a point when more advice doesn’t create clarity. It creates noise.

You can research something thoroughly and still never remove all the risk. You can ask ten successful business owners whether you should start a company and receive ten different answers. Eventually, you have to accept that nobody can guarantee the outcome for you.

Sometimes adulthood is simply gathering enough information, making the best decision you can and accepting that you will be responsible for what happens next.

Be prepared to own the consequences too

The freedom to make your own decisions comes with an uncomfortable companion: responsibility.

If you want to choose a path other people advised you against, you also have to accept the possibility that it might not work.

The business might fail. The new job might be terrible. The move might not make you happier. You may discover that the thing you desperately wanted wasn’t what you imagined it would be.

That doesn’t automatically mean you were wrong to try. We sometimes judge decisions entirely by their outcomes, but a sensible decision can produce a bad result and a reckless decision can occasionally work brilliantly. What matters is whether you considered what you reasonably could with the information available at the time.

Making your own choices doesn’t guarantee you’ll make perfect ones. It simply means they are yours.

You may disappoint people

This is perhaps one of the hardest parts of choosing your own direction.

Sometimes somebody you love will genuinely wish you had chosen differently. Your parents might prefer you to have a secure career. Your friends may miss the version of you who had more time. People around you might not understand why you’re still working towards something when, from their perspective, you already have enough.

You can love those people without building your life around avoiding their disappointment. If every major decision has to keep everybody around you comfortable, eventually you may create a life that works beautifully for everyone except the person actually living it.

There is no version of adulthood where every person you care about approves of every choice you make. Trying to create one can become its own form of unhappiness.

Success is personal

We talk about success as though everybody is trying to reach roughly the same destination. We aren’t.

For one person, success might mean building a company employing hundreds of people. For somebody else, it is earning enough money to work four days a week and spend Fridays with their children. One person wants the enormous house; another wants to own a small home without a mortgage. Somebody dreams about becoming chief executive while somebody sitting in the same office cannot imagine anything worse.

The problem begins when we start living according to somebody else’s definition. If you don’t want their destination, be careful about automatically following their directions.

This doesn’t mean your definition of success will remain the same forever either. The business you desperately wanted to build at 30 may not be what you want at 50. The career that once mattered enormously may eventually become less important than your family, health or freedom.

You are allowed to change the plan. It is your plan.

Build the life you actually want to live

There is something incredibly freeing about accepting that other people don’t have to understand why you want what you want.

You don’t need somebody who values security to become excited about your appetite for risk. You don’t need somebody who loves employment to understand why you want to build a business. You don’t need somebody whose idea of a perfect life is completely different from yours to approve of the sacrifices you’re prepared to make.

Listen to people. Take good advice. Pay attention when somebody you trust raises a genuine concern and think carefully about the people who will be affected by your choices. Then decide what you want your life to look like.

There will always be somebody who would do it differently. Let them. They have their own life in which they are free to make completely different choices.

You only get to build one of your own, and something that important was never supposed to be a group decision.

Keep looking after you

Wellbeing looks different for everyone, and sometimes the most useful thing is simply finding the right information at the right time. Explore more from Daily Round with our dedicated Women’s Health, Men’s Wellbeing and Wellbeing for Leaders sections, or head to the Leaders Library for our latest book recommendations, ideas and inspiration for life in and outside work.