A guy in the car beside me gets pissed off because he thinks I cut him off.
He honks. Maybe he flips me off. Maybe he yells something through the window.
And for some reason, there is a version of me that could let that bother me for the next twenty minutes.
But why?
I don’t know this guy. I don’t know whether he makes good decisions. I don’t know whether he’s intelligent. I don’t know whether he’s thoughtful. I don’t know whether he’s an asshole. I don’t know whether his own life is going great or is an absolute disaster.
He has done nothing to make his opinion of me valuable to me.
So why would I give it value?
That question has made me think more broadly about opinions. Not whether people are allowed to have them. Of course they are.
The question is whether their opinion has earned any value to me.
Because I don’t think every opinion should.
An Opinion Doesn’t Have Value Just Because Someone Has One
We seem to have a strange default assumption that when somebody expresses an opinion about us, we should somehow process it.
Maybe we defend ourselves. Maybe we get angry. Maybe we second-guess a decision. Maybe we carry the criticism around for the rest of the day.
But why?
If someone tells me, “I think you’re making a terrible career decision,” my first internal question doesn’t necessarily need to be, “What if they’re right?”
It might be:
Why does your opinion about my career have value to me?
What have they done? What do they know about my situation? What kind of decisions have they made in their own life? Have they demonstrated good judgment? Do they understand what I’m trying to accomplish? Have they earned any influence over how I think about this?
Sometimes the answer will be yes.
Sometimes the answer will be no.
That doesn’t mean the person isn’t allowed to have the opinion. It means I don’t automatically have to assign it value.
People Earn Opinion Value in Different Ways
My wife has earned the right for her opinion to matter to me.
Not because she has a certification. Not because she has some special technical expertise in every decision I make.
She has earned it through our relationship.
She is my life partner. She knows me deeply. My decisions affect her. I care about her emotional and physical well-being. We have built a shared life together.
So if she has an opinion about something I’m doing, that opinion carries value.
Other people earn that value differently.
Someone might earn it through experience. Someone might earn it through competence. Someone might earn it because I have watched them consistently make good decisions. Someone might earn it because they have already accomplished something I’m trying to accomplish.
Someone might earn it simply because they understand a particular situation better than almost anyone else.
There isn’t one universal reason an opinion becomes valuable.
But the value should come from somewhere.
My Mechanic Has Earned an Opinion About My Car
My mechanic has earned the right for his opinion about my car to have value to me.
If he tells me, “Your engine is done. You should replace it,” I should probably listen.
He has spent years working on cars. He understands engines. He has probably inspected my particular vehicle. Maybe he has worked on it before.
His opinion has earned value in that area.
Now imagine a brain surgeon tells me, “I think you need a new engine.”
Okay.
Maybe he is one of the best brain surgeons in the country. Maybe he is incredibly intelligent. Maybe he has spent decades becoming exceptional at what he does.
That still does not make him a mechanic.
And if my mechanic starts giving me advice about brain surgery, his twenty years of automotive experience suddenly doesn’t help very much.
Someone can earn enormous credibility in one area without earning it in another.
Expertise can create its own blind spots, and it also has boundaries.
Success has boundaries too.
Someone might build a billion-dollar company and still give terrible relationship advice. Someone might be an incredible surgeon and know very little about investing. Someone might be financially successful and have absolutely no idea how to raise children.
Achievement in one area does not automatically create authority in every other area.
Knowledge of Context Changes the Value
Even expertise by itself isn’t enough.
Imagine I have two equally capable mechanics.
One has spent three hours looking at my car. He has seen the diagnostic codes. He knows its repair history. He knows what parts have already been replaced. He has driven it.
The other mechanic has never seen the car.
They may have the same general expertise, but their opinions about my specific car should not have the same value.
Context changes things.
Someone might understand business very well and know almost nothing about my business.
Someone might know a lot about relationships and understand very little about my marriage.
Someone might understand an industry but know almost nothing about the particular deal I’m considering.
So the question isn’t only, “How much does this person know about the subject?”
It’s also, “How much do they know about this particular situation?”
That can change the value of an opinion dramatically.
Closeness Can Be Overvalued
There is a different mistake we can make with the people closest to us.
Closeness can absolutely give an opinion value.
But closeness does not make someone an expert on everything.
My wife may have enormous influence over whether spending $15,000 repairing a vehicle makes sense for our family. She should. That decision affects both of us.
But that doesn’t mean she should have more authority than the mechanic when it comes to diagnosing what is actually wrong with the engine.
Those are two different kinds of opinion value.
The mechanic has technical expertise.
My wife has relationship, context, and shared consequence.
Both matter. They just matter for different reasons.
The same applies to parents, siblings, close friends, and other people we love.
They can care about us deeply. They can genuinely want what is best for us.
And their advice can still be wrong.
Affection is not expertise. Good intentions are not the same thing as good judgment.
Sometimes we give an opinion too much weight simply because it came from somebody close to us.
Credibility Has a Shelf Life
There is also a recency problem.
Someone may have genuinely earned credibility in an area.
But when did they earn it?
Imagine someone spent twenty years building successful companies, retired in 2002, and is now giving extremely confident advice about digital marketing in 2026.
Their business experience still has value. Some principles may be timeless.
But parts of their knowledge have aged.
Industries change. Technology changes. Regulations change. Markets change. People change.
So “this person has experience” isn’t always enough.
Sometimes the better question is:
How current is the experience that gave this opinion value?
That doesn’t mean older experience should be ignored. It means the weight should be adjusted to the situation.
Opinion Value Can Be Earned and Lost
Nobody should earn permanent authority over your thinking.
Someone might give me excellent advice for years.
Then something changes.
They start making bad decisions. They start speaking confidently about things they don’t understand. Their incentives change. Their judgment deteriorates.
Or maybe I simply learn enough myself to realize that some of the advice I once valued wasn’t actually very good.
The value I assign their opinion should be able to decline.
The opposite should happen too.
Maybe someone starts with very little influence over me.
Then I repeatedly watch them make good decisions. They notice things I miss. They understand situations clearly. They admit when they don’t know something. They are consistently thoughtful.
Eventually I start thinking, “When this person says something, I should probably listen.”
They earned that.
Opinion value should be revocable. Nobody earns permanent authority.
What If Someone Whose Opinion I Don’t Value Is Right?
There is an obvious danger in this way of thinking.
It can become an easy excuse to dismiss criticism.
If I decide somebody’s opinion has no value, I could just ignore everything they say.
That would be stupid.
Someone I don’t think highly of can still be right.
A lazy coworker can notice a mistake I made. A stranger can point out something true. Someone with very little experience can ask a question that exposes a flaw in my thinking.
The fact that I don’t assign much value to the source does not mean the information itself is automatically false.
There is a difference between saying, “Your opinion does not carry much weight with me,” and saying, “Nothing you say could possibly be correct.”
The first can be reasonable.
The second is arrogance.
I still need to be capable of examining the information itself, because having an opinion and having thought deeply aren’t the same thing.
Stop Giving Everyone Equal Access to Your Emotions
The practical value of all of this shows up in how much emotional energy we waste.
Someone thinks I work too much.
Someone else thinks I don’t work enough.
Someone thinks I’m cheap.
Someone else thinks I spend too much.
Someone thinks I’m too aggressive.
Someone else thinks I’m not aggressive enough.
Someone doesn’t like the way I run my business. Someone doesn’t like my career choices. Someone doesn’t like how I parent. Someone doesn’t like my personality.
There is no possible way to satisfy all of those people.
More importantly, there is no reason all of those opinions should carry equal weight.
Some opinions should affect me.
If my wife tells me, “I’m worried about the person you’re becoming,” I should listen.
If someone whose judgment I’ve trusted for twenty years tells me, “I think you’re making a serious mistake,” that might keep me awake at night.
Maybe it should.
But if the guy beside me in traffic thinks I’m an asshole?
He knows nothing about me. He has demonstrated nothing about the quality of his judgment. He has contributed nothing to my life. He will probably disappear at the next traffic light.
Why should he get the power to ruin the next twenty minutes?
What Has This Person Done to Make Their Opinion Valuable to Me?
I don’t think the goal is to become someone who doesn’t care what anybody thinks.
I actually think that would be stupid.
There are people whose opinions I want to matter to me.
There are people whose judgment I actively want influencing my decisions.
There are people who have earned that place.
The better question is whether I’ve been deliberate about who those people are.
When someone gives me an opinion, maybe the question I should ask is:
What has this person done to make their opinion valuable to me on this particular subject?
Sometimes the answer will be obvious.
A lot.
Sometimes the answer will be that they are my wife.
Sometimes they have spent thirty years doing this.
Sometimes they have made the exact decision I’m considering several times before.
Sometimes they understand this particular situation better than almost anyone else.
And sometimes the answer will simply be:
Nothing.
If the answer is nothing, maybe their opinion doesn’t deserve nearly as much space in my head as I’ve been giving it.
I don’t want fewer valuable opinions in my life.
I want to become more deliberate about separating the person from the qualities I value and which opinions I assign value to.
