Over my life, I’ve encountered the figure of “fortune tellers,” and it’s not that I’ve been to one: I find them everywhere.
These are people who will try to give you advice (without you asking) about future events that they predict will happen always enhancing the negative side of things:
- “You won’t make it in the new company; you left too early and don’t have the necessary expertise”
- “That project is too hard; better to hand it over to other folks”
- “You won’t pass the certification; it’s too senior for you”
- “You’ll lose everything in the stock market; better buy a house because it’s safer”
- “Your pizza dough won’t ferment because of XYZ”
And yet… all of these were wrong!
Every single day I keep finding fortune tellers who advise on what I should be doing and why I’m going to fail because of past experiences that happened in different contexts that do not matter anymore!
Listen. I’m me and you are you. Why that happened to you, or you heard it somewhere won’t necessarily happen to me, because of my personal context and how I’m built as an individual. I may be more prepared, or have a different attitude toward certain problems that you didn’t have at the time.
- I’ll make it in the new company because I’m self-sufficient in learning and know my way around overcoming roadblocks.
- I’ll spend hours completing the project because I’m driven by my motivation to learn and achieve new challenges.
- I’ll study in the library everyday after work and implement real use cases in my company to pass the certification.
- I’ll diversify my portfolio so as not to go bankrupt because ACME Inc. failed to deliver its quarterly results.
- I’ll add more flour to the dough so it’s more consistent.
And in the end, if I fail… then what? I prefer to fail and learn, than to succeed and never realize I was wrong all the time.
Failures are part of life, and they shape many areas of it. You need to fail in order to continue learning; face challenges and learn how to overcome them.
Every new failure is an opportunity to do things right next time, and I prefer to fail firsthand because that’s when you learn the most, not because my neighbor next door heard something about it and believes it. (Stock investments are heavily punished because of a lack of knowledge and strategy.)
So the next time I find myself hearing unwanted advice from the so-called fortune tellers, I’ll always think twice about what they have to say, and find out what the source of their predictions is, because most of the time they are just infused thoughts.