Today's article was supposed to be about a story I saw pertaining to cinder blocks. I had seen a video on LinkedIn in which this woman spoke about the original design for cinder blocks: a 100-pound block that was hard to carry and use. Then, after feedback sessions, they carved the holes out and made them only thirty pounds, keeping "only the part that was needed." She told a whole story about how they became more sturdy and better to use as a result, and she was making a correlation between our careers and how you would carve out the stuff that we don't need, and we become stronger as a result.
Turns out that story is complete bullshit.
Yes, there was a guy who created heavy concrete blocks, but his iteration to the cinder block we know today was simply the result of molds that they created to make them lighter. Not some big beautiful story about how there was feedback in the field and they removed stuff strategically to become stronger yada yada yada.
I mean, I bought the story hook, line, and sinker. I was ready to tell the story right here to all of you and put my twist on careers. Before I did, though, I wanted to do some of my own research just to make sure I wasn't re-selling some bullshit.
Turns out, it's basically bullshit.
Now the message stacks up, and you can imagine when I saw the story, I thought to myself: that computes very well.
"There's a version of yourself that's heavy and not really functional, but you take out all of the trauma and the people who don't fit and the mess that you've built internally, and you heal, and you become lighter and stronger and actually a better version of you."
See, that story computes very well, and when she was on stage telling it, everyone bought it. Until I dug into it and realized it was a stretch of the truth, I was reminded that we should all be careful about who we're being influenced by.
We don't just get influenced by people. We get influenced by how cleanly they package an idea. The smoother the story, the easier it is to accept. The more it "clicks," the less we question it. And if it aligns with something we already want to believe about ourselves or our lives, we don't just accept it, we adopt it. That's exactly what happened to me. It wasn't that I was careless. It was that the story felt right.
But feeling right and being right are not the same thing. And if you're not careful, you start building your thinking, your decisions, even your identity, on ideas that were never fully true to begin with. That's where this gets dangerous because then it becomes about the fact that we're constantly consuming other people's interpretations of the world, and we rarely stop to ask, "Where did this come from, and does it actually hold up?"
The people you listen to are shaping how you see everything. Your career. Your confidence. Your definition of success. And most of them aren't malicious, they're just passing along their version of the truth, filtered through their experiences, their biases, and sometimes their need to tell a compelling story. That doesn't make them wrong, but it does mean their version might not be your version.
If you blindly accept it, you end up chasing someone else's narrative instead of building your own.
So the real work isn't just cutting things out of your life as that original story suggested. It's being intentional about what you let in. Who you listen to. What you choose to believe. Because once an idea gets in your head, it sticks around longer than you think. And if you want to build something solid, whether it's your career or your confidence, you'd better make damn sure the foundation isn't built on something that just sounded good in the moment.