Listen To The Advice, But Make Your Own Mistakes Regardless
Don’t let anyone talk you out of making your own unique choices and learning from the mistakes
Everyone wants to feel superior, especially when their thoughts are been prioritized. We all want our perspectives on certain situations to be valid in the life of someone else. We say to ourselves:
If it worked for me, why wouldn’t it work for someone else, if it is good for me, why wouldn’t it be good for you.
One crucial thing we tend to forget when dishing out unsolicited advice is that, every human experience is totally different, regardless of how similar it might seem.
Yes, you might mean well, but you always have to respect the solicitor’s choices, you have to empower their choices instead of propagating your grandiosity. You might want your formula to be popular and practiced by more individuals, but every individual choice in itself requires its own formula.
We have to make our own unique mistakes sometimes and this requires us taking that action that seems flawed to everyone, but feels very genuine to us. It’s a process and we keep making the mistake of trying to prove something to other people who are probably just as confused about their own lives.
Someone else’s expectation would ruin your authenticity. Expectations in itself only manifests when the next person’s authenticity is suppressed.
From the day we were born, our parents and guardians have always had an expectation of us. Their expectations, though seeming genuine to them, is definitely inauthentic to us, because it never puts our choices into consideration.
The wants of a parent, almost always says more about them, than about their child. This is because everyone in varying degrees, have a narcissistic view about how the world should be, including our parents. Since the day you were born, they’ve always had a perspective of how you should be.
This very narrow perspective of parents, make them see their children as complementary figures on their lives and ‘extras’ shaping their futures. The future they want for you has to align with their own future, if not they risk losing their control.
Most times, you’re not a black sheep because of the choices you made, but because your parents feel they’re losing their grip on your future. Sometimes, the ideal future for you was never for you, it was always for your parents, it was always for everybody else but you.
Dear Reader, feel free to listen to divergent advice and views, but never feel obligated to apply them. Appreciate the guardian, care enough to value their time, but always prioritize your authenticity first.
Nobody is thinking about you 24/7, so there’s definitely no need to practice someone else’s opinion 24/7. Everyone else’s expectation lacks adequate consideration for you, and is filled with their approval for you to fit in. Everyone’s ideal situation for you, is nothing but a situation that fits into their idea of an ideal ‘You’.
The recurring debacle we make is allowing our choices complement someone else’s expectations of us, when we should be using everyone’s expectations to complement our own choices.
As a person, you have vast amount of choices, but your awareness of those choices are as limited as what you listen to and how frequently you listen to other people. Your choices are there for you, but to unlock them, you must be aware of their presence and availability.
Listening to everyone else but yourself, and taking what other people say heavily would only limit your awareness of the power in your own choices. You keep seeing your life through the lenses of everyone else, and applying choices that don’t in any way fit into your condition.
We have to learn from the mistakes of those before us, but we still have to fail in our own way.
Go ahead, fail genuinely, get laughed at, but on your own terms. Don’t keep pleasing everyone else but yourself, because when you still fail, they’ll never take a pause with you.
Enjoy your immaturity, have fun with your naivety, but make that decision, take that step. Stop reading, stop watching, stop observing, stop asking, just make a choice and move, because without experience, you’re still going to remain naive.
You can’t read and observe your way through naivety all the time, sometimes you have to just do it regardless of what everyone else has to say. We’re all going to die someday, so why not live today, not for your parents, or guardians, or peers, or friends, or community, but for yourself.
I tell stories that matter, feel free to join me here.
