What To Do When Everyone Thinks You’ve Lost Your Mind
How to deal with the people that want to talk you out of your big life choices
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Welcome back to a month of answering reader questions! Remember, if you’d like me to answer your questions about making big career and life decisions, leave a comment below or send me an email. Readers who ask my favorite questions get a signed copy of Solving for Why.
This week’s question comes from Ali, who writes: “How do you convince others that the decision they think you made about a huge life changing event being completely out of left field is actually rational, thought through, and OK. Is it their insecurities or is that decision completely barking mad!!”
I love this question. So much so that I’m actually going to break it up into two questions. Next week, we’ll talk about how to incorporate others into your big decision. But for this week:
What are you supposed to do when everyone thinks you’ve lost your mind?
PS. You don’t have to navigate your big decisions alone. Click the button to book a free call ↓
If you’re making decisions with your best interests in mind, if you’re making the decisions that’ll lead you to a life you’re in love with again, then you’re absolutely guaranteed to get naysayers.
Be not dismayed, you’re not alone. Naysayers are as common as gnats in the summer.
You’ve made a call—a career pivot, a move, a relationship choice, a financial bet—and the people around you react as if you’ve grown hair on your teeth.
A personal example: The second time I decided to interrupt my surgical career, in 2007, it was to take a year off. I was coming to the end of the first of two surgical fellowships I’d do, and I was deeply burnt out. Like, all the burnout symptoms: anhedonia, abulia, feeling dead inside.
I needed out. I needed a break.
And everyone told me that taking a break would be idiotic. (One person actually used that word).
“You’ll never get back to medicine,” they said. “No job will ever take you seriously.” “Everyone will think you don’t have what it takes to be a real surgeon.” “You’ll always be a flight risk.”
I won’t lie to you—that discourse was destabilizing. Could they see something I didn’t? Was I about to ruin my career?
Or were they projecting their own fears onto my life?
How do you deal with the naysayers? Well, here’s what the decision science says.
Before we go on… Are you stuck on some big decisions? Let’s talk ↓
Part 1: Whose Decision Is It, Really?
Before we debate whether your decision is rational, it helps to answer a prior question: who has standing to make this call?
In the world of decision-making, we distinguish the decider from the stakeholders. Two things set the decider apart from other stakeholders: the decider bears the consequences of a decision and is accountable for its outcome.
If the proverbial fan gets proverbially soiled, it’s the decider who faces the music.
Stakeholders, on the other hand, are affected by the decision, but the final consequences and accountability aren’t theirs. Their input matters, of course; crucially, however, it’s just input. It’s not a vote.
How do you discern between the two?
A useful question to ask is: whose life changes materially if this goes badly? If the answer is mostly “mine,” then you’re the decider. On the other hand, if your spouse will share the financial risk, or your children will change schools, or your choice means moving the whole family to a new country, then they have real standing.
A parent who disapproves of your career change, a friend who thinks you’re moving too far away, or my bosses and colleagues in that 2007 decision—they’re all stakeholders. They have feelings; their feelings have weight; but that weight doesn’t rise to veto power.
Distinguishing between stakeholders and deciders is the foundation of any coherent framework for decision rights. And it’s not always obvious: people routinely confuse being consulted with being obeyed. Stakeholders who can’t talk you out of something can end up feeling dismissed, even when they were genuinely heard. Part of your job is to be clear—both with yourself and with them—about the role they play.
Silence the naysayers. Photo by Francisco De Legarreta C. on Unsplash
Part 2: Explaining It To Others
Alright, if you’ve gotten this far, the decision was yours to make. How do you talk to your naysayers? How do you incorporate stakeholder input, and how do you know which input to ignore?
Let me start with an image (borrowed from the author Emily Nagoski). Dissent is not dangerous. It’s easy to fear dissent, but dissent isn’t the problem. Dissent is the lifeguard’s whistle—it’s telling you that something might be up. There might be a reason to get out of the water—a rip tide, a shark, an algal bloom.
We don’t fear the lifeguard’s whistle. In the same way, we don’t have to fear dissent, properly contextualized.
Separate the logic disagreement from a values disagreement
Very often, people who think your decision is crazier than bat excrement aren’t disputing your reasoning—they’re disputing your values, your goals, and how you weigh them against each other.
Your mother may accept that leaving law for a career in pottery will make you happier in the day-to-day. She might fully agree with that, even. It’s just that she weighs prestige and income stability higher than you do.
All the naysayers in the 2007 decision (every single one of them) eventually told me that they wished they had taken a year off themselves, before the kids, the mortgage, the patient panels. Their disagreement was a values disagreement—career trajectory, stability, and reputation held more weight for them than it did for me.
These are values disagreements, not disagreements about logic.
Recognizing a values disagreement frees you from trying to logic your naysayers into agreeing with you (or vice versa).
And that’s because no amount of logic will change the fact that your objective function isn’t theirs. And, “I understand we weight these things differently” is a far more honest reply than re-litigating whether you’ll be happy.
Run a pre-mortem
Ask yourself: what if the lifeguard’s whistle is onto something? What if there is a shark in the water?
The psychologist Gary Klein suggests imagining that your decision fails, and then preparing for that outcome. In other words, imagine it’s two years from now and the decision led to bad outcomes.
Write down the reasons why. Why did the decision fail? Why were the outcomes bad? Was it just bad luck or was there something else, something you could prepare for now?
If this pre-mortem surfaces the same worries that your critics have, then pay attention to what they’re saying.
On the other hand, if the pre-mortem surfaces different concerns, consider that your critics may be pattern-matching to their own fears rather than to yours (or even to reality).
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Ask whether your critics are calibrated
Your critics can be calibrated (or not) in two ways: internally and externally.
Internal calibration deals with whether the critics themselves have ever experienced what you’re attempting. For example, a friend who has never left a stable job telling you that leaving a stable job is reckless—that’s an uncalibrated critic.
On the other hand, a friend who’s made similar transitions to the one you’re considering, successfully or not, is a calibrated one.
Look also for external calibration: are all your critics surfacing the same issues, the same concerns? If so, it’s worth addressing them, at least in your own reasoning. Include them in your pre-mortem.
The wisdom of large numbers is something you should at least consider—even if it’s to negate it.
Take the outside view
When I started my coaching business, I was convinced it would become profitable—wildly so—within a year. Why? Because I had taken all the right courses, made all the right plans, done all the right things, with all the right drive.
Spoiler: my coaching business lost money that first year.
What happened? Something called the planning fallacy. That is, the fallacy that if we plan everything just right, it will succeed.
Kahneman and Tversky propose two “views” on decisions. There’s the “inside view”—the story you tell yourself about your specific plan. I suffered from taking the inside view: because I’ve made all these plans, done all the right things, then therefore everything will work the way it’s supposed to.
A more reasoned approach is to take the “outside view.” That’s the view that asks: of people who have done something structurally similar, how did it turn out? How long did it take? What obstacles did others encounter?
The outside view would have said to me, “Wait, Mark. Most businesses aren’t profitable until years 3 – 5.” And had I taken the outside view, I wouldn’t have been nearly as gutted as I was by reading my balance sheet at the end of year one.
So, take the outside view in your decision. If most career pivots like yours work out, that’s reassuring. If most don’t, your critics might have a point—take their concerns into consideration and plan for them.
Finally, don’t confuse decision quality with outcome quality
That was the topic of last week’s post. If you didn’t get to read it, it’s here.
So, finally…do you owe your critics an explanation?
Honestly? Not really. You don’t. Your decisions—if they are truly yours—are not theirs to make.
But also, consider writing an explanation for yourself. Consider documenting your reasons, your tradeoffs, the pre-mortem, the reference class you consulted, the uncertainties you’ve accepted.
Keep that somewhere that you can reread when the pressure mounts, when the balance sheet doesn’t look like it was supposed to, when the 2am “Dang it I should have listened to John” doubt creeps in.
And then if you do choose to explain it to others, share more than just your verdict. Share your reasoning: “Here’s how I thought about it” invites partnership. “Here’s what I’m doing” can sometimes invite combat.
If, after all that, they’re still sure you’ve lost your mind…Well, that’s on them.
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