If someone, somewhere, tells you that your idea is absolutely ridiculous and you shouldn't do whatever it is that you want to go and do, perhaps you should consider that your cue to go do the thing that people are telling you is ridiculous.
I'll explain.
Some of the biggest and most successful brands were originally said to be terrible ideas.
Ring, the doorbell camera and video camera company, was rejected by all four sharks on the Shark Tank. They went on to be acquired by Amazon for around $1B.
Airbnb was originally rejected by numerous investors under the premise, “Who is going to stay in a stranger's house?” Turns out, millions of people are every year.
Facebook was rejected as “just a college social network.”
And one of my all-time favorites, Spanx, which was sold for $1.2B. Founder Sara Blakely was told by male investors, “Nobody is going to buy this product.”
If someone tells you your idea sucks, it might just be a sign that it's worth a billion dollars.
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Now, this doesn't always hold true, but just because someone tells you that you have a bad idea, or that your career plans suck, or that you should join one company over another, or that you should leave a job, stay at a job, do anything in your career, it doesn't mean you have to listen to them.
Bad advice is out there all the time. It's generally free advice, and it generally comes without strings attached. So take it for what it's worth when it shows up in front of you.
Most people giving you that advice are not operating from experience; they are operating from comfort, from their own risk tolerance, from the lens of what they would be willing to do if they were in your shoes, and that is a dangerous filter to run your life through when you are the one who has to wake up every day and live with the decisions that get made.
It is easy to tell someone not to take a swing when you are not the one standing in the batter's box; it is easy to call something unrealistic when you are not the one carrying the weight of wondering what would have happened if you actually tried.
There is also something subtle that happens when an idea is early, and it is the part that people completely miss, which is that early ideas often look incomplete, awkward, and a little bit broken, and that is exactly why they get dismissed so quickly. Nobody saw the finished version of Airbnb when they heard about it the first time, nobody saw the scale of Facebook when it was limited to a few college campuses, and nobody saw Spanx sitting on shelves across the world when Sara Blakely was cutting up product in her apartment; they saw version one and judged it as if it was version ten.
You have to be careful not to outsource your conviction to people who have nothing at stake in the outcome, especially when their opinion is based on a snapshot moment of something that has not had the chance to evolve yet. The truth is that most great ideas require a level of patience, iteration, and resilience that can look irrational from the outside, and if you are constantly seeking external validation before you move forward, you are going to kill your own momentum before it ever has a chance to build into something real.
At some point, you have to decide whose voice actually matters in your life, and more importantly, whose voice does not, and that line needs to get drawn a lot tighter than most people are comfortable with. The people who build meaningful things are not the ones who never hear criticism; they are the ones who hear it, process it, and then keep moving anyway, trusting that their willingness to stay in the game longer than everyone else is the real advantage that compounds over time.