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How to Stop Only Considering the Opinions of Others and Start Creating Your Own

Forget the facts. Learn to think for yourself instead.

Daniel Bourke
4 min readJan 23, 2020

A decade ago I was scared. It was the last year of high-school and teachers were asking “what do you want to do in your life?”.

“Lady, I’ve got no idea, I wake up, get dressed, come to school, listen, try to pass the exams, think about playing computer games all day, go home, play computers until I realise it’s getting late and I’m supposed to wake up at some point tomorrow morning, then sleep.”

“You could be a lawyer, a doctor or do a trade, an apprenticeship, a builder, you’ve got options.”

“But what if I don’t like any of them?”

“Just make sure you do well on your exams, how you go will influence what you do for the rest of your life.”

“What? How? They don’t even make sense. We go into a room sit there not being able to talk to each other and fill out some sheet with questions which don’t sound like questions anyone would ever ask.”

This conversation never happened but it’s what played in my mind. 16-years-old, dressed up in a uniform and being asked to make decisions about life. How? I hadn't faced any real challenges yet. Except trying to figure out the best…

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