There are times when you hear something at exactly the right moment.
This was one of those times for me.
I came across a 45-minute discussion built around an idea associated with Jordan Peterson that sounds almost ridiculously simple:
Nothing has to bother you unless you allow it to bother you.
Think about that for a minute.
How many times has somebody said something about you — a stranger on the internet, somebody who doesn’t really know you, somebody angry with you, somebody trying to provoke you — and somehow their words ended up occupying space in your head for the rest of the day?
Sometimes for days.
Sometimes much longer.
The person who said it may have forgotten about it five minutes later.
But you’re still carrying it.
That’s the part of this discussion that grabbed me.
The Black Sheep Problem
If you’ve ever been the Black Sheep, you probably understand this better than most.
Being willing to stand apart from the crowd almost guarantees that somebody isn’t going to like what you’re doing.
People will criticize you.
They’ll misunderstand you.
They’ll judge your motives.
Some people will decide who you are without ever actually knowing you.
And the instinctive response is to defend yourself against every criticism, correct every misunderstanding and fight every battle.
But eventually you have to ask yourself:
Who is actually controlling whom?
If somebody can write ten words about you and those ten words determine your emotional state for the next 24 hours, they’ve been given an extraordinary amount of power.
And you handed them the keys.
Emotions Are Signals — Not Commands
One of the strongest ideas explored in this discussion is the distinction between experiencing an emotion and obeying it.
Anger can tell you something.
Fear can tell you something.
Hurt can tell you something.
Resentment can certainly tell you something.
But none of those emotions automatically gets to decide what you do next.
That’s an important distinction.
The goal isn’t to become emotionless.
It isn’t to stop caring.
And it certainly isn’t to pretend that genuinely painful things don’t hurt.
The goal is to create some space between:
What happened
and
What I am going to do about it.
That little space may be one of the most important pieces of psychological real estate we possess.
Responsibility Changes the Equation
The uncomfortable part is responsibility.
It is easy to say:
“That person made me angry.”
It is considerably harder to say:
“What they did made me angry, but what I do with that anger belongs to me.”
Those are two very different ways of looking at life.
Taking responsibility doesn’t mean accepting blame for somebody else’s conduct.
It doesn’t mean tolerating abuse, dishonesty or injustice.
And it doesn’t mean remaining silent when something genuinely needs to be confronted.
It means refusing to surrender control of your own mind while confronting it.
That’s strength.
Not Every Battle Deserves You
This may be the lesson I’m learning more than anything else.
You can be right about something and still destroy yourself trying to prove it to everybody.
You can spend enormous amounts of energy answering people who were never interested in hearing your answer in the first place.
You can explain yourself 100 different ways to someone committed to misunderstanding you.
At some point, wisdom means recognizing the difference between a battle that matters and noise.
Ignoring noise isn’t surrender.
Sometimes it’s discipline.
Sometimes the most powerful response available to you is simply deciding:
You don’t get to occupy space in my head anymore.
Facts Versus Feelings
Another useful idea from the discussion is learning to separate what actually happened from the story your mind immediately constructs around it.
Someone criticizes you.
That’s the event.
Your mind might immediately add:
“Everybody must think that.”
“Maybe they’re right.”
“I need to answer this immediately.”
“How dare they say that about me?”
“I’m going to show them.”
Now the original event has turned into an entire internal courtroom.
And you’re the prosecutor, defence lawyer, witness, judge and jury — at 3:00 in the morning.
That’s overthinking.
The better question is:
What are the actual facts?
Then:
Is there something useful I need to do about them?
If yes, do it.
If no, let it go.
Easier said than done.
But probably worth learning.
Meaning Over Comfort
Peterson has spent years talking about responsibility and meaning, and this discussion brings those ideas back to something very practical.
A meaningful life isn’t necessarily a comfortable life.
Standing for something isn’t always comfortable.
Telling the truth isn’t always comfortable.
Changing your own behaviour isn’t comfortable either.
But chasing emotional comfort every minute of the day can leave you controlled by whatever happens around you.
The alternative is deciding what actually matters and orienting yourself toward that.
Your family.
Your work.
Your purpose.
Your integrity.
Your future.
Whatever those things are for you.
Then the random voices become smaller.
The Black Sheep Takeaway
I’ve spent a lot of my life believing that when somebody throws something at you, you have to throw something back.
I’m starting to see another possibility.
Maybe strength isn’t responding harder.
Maybe sometimes strength is deciding that the person throwing rocks doesn’t get to determine where you’re walking.
That’s different.
And I’m working on it.
Because being a Black Sheep shouldn’t mean spending your entire life fighting the flock.
Sometimes it means knowing exactly who you are, knowing where you’re going, and continuing to walk while everybody else is still yelling behind you.
So here’s the question I’m taking away from this:
What am I allowing to bother me today that doesn’t deserve another minute of my life?
That’s a question worth asking.
And maybe an even better one is:
What could I build with all the energy I’ve been spending being bothered?
That one hit me.
🐑 The Black Sheep
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