Why the Most Popular Thing to Do Isn’t Always the Best Thing to Do
By: Brian Kim - November 19, 2008
Human beings have long developed the notion that if everyone else is doing it, it must be right. That kind of thinking acted as a “filter” so to speak as it was crucial to human survival back in the day. If the tribe was avoiding a certain kind of food, it would be wise if you did too. Everyone else was avoiding it for a reason. You should too.
But survival isn’t really an issue nowadays (for those who are living in developed countries).
People born in the 21st century have an unprecedented number of ways to live their life now and because there are so many choices to make now more than ever before, it makes us rely that much more heavily upon our “popularity radar” to sift through all of it.
But the dangerous thing about always doing the popular thing is that you let go of your responsibility to make sure everything goes through YOU first, before you make any decisions and you begin to rely on others too much to make the decisions for you.
And the longer this goes on, the harder it becomes for you to truly do what you want to do when the time comes.
Don’t give up your internal thinking and leave it up to people outside of you.
What might be right for them might not be right for you.
If you blindly follow the crowd, it’s easy to feel out of control, at a loss for personal power, and feel like a ship tossed here and there by the waves of life, with no steering wheel and anchor to help weather the storm.
Look at the whole U.S subprime disaster that sent the global economy into a recession. People were being encouraged by mortgage brokers to take on loans to buy houses they could not afford. They could sign up for special interest only or variable rate loans and then refinance in the future because they thought, like many others, that houses would appreciate in value quickly and that they could cash in on it.
Everyone was doing it. You should too. And people did. They fell for it hook, line and sinker, rather than run through all that information internally, through their own decision making process.
Had a person had their own “steering wheel”, they would know the numbers wouldn’t match up and that housing prices wouldn’t rise forever.
That’s the dangerous thing about popularity. It snowballs so quickly. It has such a profound bandwagon effect and since communication has become more sophisticated now than ever before, it’s easier to get exposed to all that, all the time.
As a result, people stop thinking for themselves.
They let others think for them.
And other people don’t really have YOUR best interests at heart.
And not to mention, you’ve got the whole social pressure thing going on as well. If you’re not doing what everyone else is doing, you won’t be part of the group and that hurts us on an instinct level because if you weren’t part of the group back in the day, your chances of survival were very low.
By no means am I saying the popular thing to do is always the wrong thing to do. It might very well be the right thing to do, but again that will be relative for each person after they take in all the information and filter it themselves, which is the most important thing because again, what might be right for a lot of people might not be right for YOU.
I know it’s not the politically correct thing to say, but most people aren’t very bright in the sense that they always look for the easy way out.
Add to that the fact that most people don’t think for themselves and let others do their thinking for them and you’ve got a deadly combination as to why the most popular thing to do isn’t always the right thing to do.
Have the courage to not cave in to popularity immediately.
Have the intellect to process everything internally first.
Do your own due diligence, come to a decision based on your internal values and logic and be able to justify your decision and what you’ll find is that it gives you self empowerment – you’ll believe in yourself, trust yourself, develop the self control not to cave to social pressure and you’ll grow strong roots so that it will be that much easier to stand up against it in the future.
And while defying the popular choices of the world may make you feel lonely, you will eventually find others like you and together, you will strengthen each other, knowing that what you’re doing is the best thing that you have decided was for you.
Remember, each time you cave to the pressure of popularity, when it’s in contrary to what YOU want to do, you’ll find it gets harder and harder to break free to do what YOU want to do, especially when the time comes for something you really want to do. You will slowly give your personal power away until you’re nothing but a robot, just following the person in front of you.
We always see this issue of popularity as a classic case of choosing a career based on what field is currently “hot”. For example, back in the late 90s and early 2000, computer science was all the rage. Students were majoring in it due to the high pay and the fact it was high in demand. So they went for it. But some students find it’s not what they really want to do.
But they’re in debt. Their education cost them a lot. And the job is “safe”. Every day, the work eats at their soul but because they caved to doing what the popular thing to do was back then and now, they’re paying the price for it in the sense that they lack the personal power to break free to do what they want to do. They feel “trapped” by the debt and the comfort of the job. Had they first processed that popular opinion to see if computer science was right for them, in the sense of whether or not whether they would enjoy the work and be interested in it, they would’ve avoided all this future pain and defied popular opinion to pursue something more suited to them.
Don’t let others think for you because if you do, they’ll gladly do it for you and you’ll eventually find yourself not living the life you wanted, because you never thought of what it would be in the first place.
Create your own vision for your life FIRST and constantly remind yourself of it and justify it, and what you’ll find is that it acts like an arrow, piercing through the popular opinions of the world to show you exactly what the truly best things to do are for you.
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November 19th, 2008 at
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