How to Make the Right Business Decisions (Even When Everyone Has an Opinion)
When you're building something, there's no shortage of people with opinions about how you should do it. They'll tell you what worked for them, what you should try, what success is supposed to look like. And often these voices are confident, experienced and genuinely well-meaning. That's what makes them hard to navigate.
Taking advice is easy. Knowing which advice is actually meant for you is harder. And it's the difference between building something that genuinely reflects who you are and what you're trying to do… and spending years trying to retrofit your vision into someone else's framework.
Other people's experience is useful. It's not a blueprint.
Listening to people who've done what you're trying to do can save you from costly mistakes and help you think about angles you hadn't considered. That's real. But most advice comes with an invisible asterisk: this worked for me, in my circumstances, with my resources, for my audience, toward my definition of success. None of those things are guaranteed to match yours.
The most quietly damaging thing about following proven advice too closely is that it can override the instincts that are specifically yours… the ones that, if you listened to them, would lead you somewhere nobody else has been. That's not a small thing to give up.
A practical way to think about it
Before you seek advice on a decision, it's worth getting honest with yourself about a few things first.
What does success actually look like to you — not abstractly, but specifically?
What are you not willing to compromise on?
What values need to be reflected in whatever you decide?
The clearer you are on those things before you ask anyone else, the easier it becomes to notice when advice is steering you somewhere you don't actually want to go.
When you do take advice, it's worth interrogating the source. Not dismissively, but genuinely. Has this person done something similar, or are they theorising? Do you respect not just what they achieved but how they achieved it? Does their worldview actually align with yours? You can admire someone and still decide their approach isn't right for you.
The most useful way to think about advice is as data rather than instruction. Something to weigh and consider and test, not something to implement wholesale. Your own judgment (including your gut) deserves at least as much weight as any external input.
On women and decision-making specifically
There's a particular version of this that's worth naming directly. Many women are socialised from a young age to defer, to be collaborative, to wait for consensus before moving. Which means that when a decision feels hard and unclear, the instinct is often to ask more people rather than to trust yourself more.
That instinct isn't wrong in itself. But it can become a way of outsourcing your own knowing to other people's certainty, and that erodes something important over time. The leaders I find most interesting aren't the ones who stopped listening to anyone. They're the ones who learned to listen to themselves first.
The only reliable test
When you're genuinely unsure about a decision, there's one question worth sitting with: if I followed this course of action and it didn't work out, would I still feel good about how I approached it?
If the answer is yes, you're probably aligned. If the answer is no, if something about it feels off even if you can't fully articulate why, that's worth paying attention to before you commit.
Bold, clear decisions aren't built on certainty. They're built on practice. Getting it wrong, learning from it, and moving anyway. Confidence isn't something you wait for. It comes from the doing.