You can mind everyone’s opinions or totally ignore them. Either way, opinions can’t validate you and your ideas — only time can.
Say someone endorses you but you turn out wrong. Time invalidates you both. Same if they disagree and you turn out to be right. Time validates you.
One trick is to become a voracious reader, a student of history — not just of your domain, but others that you could apply. Base your ideas on principles that time has validated. This helps you weather the storm of people’s opinions. Because like all storms, they must pass.
It’s also important to understand that hot takes, click bait, and blind endorsements (eg likes, retweets, etc) are the currencies of Web 2.0 — a phase of the internet that was designed with the express intent to prevent time from doing its validation work.
So what do we do as we’re working things out? A healthy social media diet must be balanced with safe spaces for half-baked ideas, because life has more than 280 characters or 640 pixels:
📚 reading
📺 watching documentaries/lectures
🤝 offline conversation
✍🏾 journaling/blogging
