Welcome to the first ever Life Economics course. Here, I’m going to briefly share with you one of the primary laws you need know to be a happier, more resilient person.

Before we continue, I’ll let you know about myself. I graduated with an Economics degree from a prestigious liberal arts college. But, don’t be impressed, because it means nothing.

Although I did graduate college with a degree in Economics sitting in class and learning about the many theories, writing papers, and drawing multiple charts on the blackboard and notebook margins is not the pre-requisite to be a Life Economist.

My traditional Economics degree didn’t do much for helping me deal with human beings on a day-to-day basis. Humans just didn’t seem to respond like commodities in such pre-calculated ways and I couldn’t figure out how to shift their demand curve with a price flux! But through my interactions, I have discovered the secret of Life Economics and…

There is no theory.

Just real world application and, today, this is your first lesson.

Human Econ Lesson #1 – Opinions are worthless

Everybody has an opinion about you. It’s easy to get caught into the milieu of other’s thoughts but I’ve discovered that you should not be concerned with it. How come? Most of it is worthless. I’m going to show you why it makes economic sense to not bother investing your hard earned life into other people’s opinions anymore.

Opinion’s are in abundance, because everyone has one (just like a… you know). So, that means there is an extremely high supply of opinions on the world market. Let’s draw the supply on a graph.

Since there’s a high quantity of opinions, the supply line is to the right. Whenever there is a high supply of something, it tends to be cheaper. Just imagine that you have the only Michael Jordan rookie card on earth and everybody wants it… you’d be sitting on gold! It would be worth an exorbitant amount of money because everyone wants what you have. So you can bid up the price. On the other hand, imagine if everybody had the same card that you have. It would hardly be worth anything because everybody has it already! It’d be like toilet paper in a public restroom.

Now, apply that same principle to opinions – everybody has one. Since everyone has one, the demand for it is low so we’ll draw the line a bit to the left to indicate its association with a lower quantity of demand. That means it’s hardly worth anything. Let’s draw add the demand curve to the graph to illustrate it.

If we draw a dotted line across, we can see just how much opinions are worth.

The Bottom Line

This is why it is important not to let everybody speak into your life. Be very selective as to who you take advice from. Everyone’s opinion is not valuable in providing guidance for how you should live. Friends, family, strangers – none of them are exempt from this rule and you should be highly discriminate within each of those categories.

The rule is this; choose to listen to the opinions of those that challenge you to be the best that you can be. Since I know that’s what you want, the voice of mediocrity does not deserve the bullhorn; the voice of weakness does not deserve the bullhorn; the voice of complacency shouldn’t even speak. Opinions are abundant and not worth anything. Just like toilet paper in a public restroom it may be of use, but it is always discarded when you handle your business properly.