Why Having an Opinion About Everything Reduces Your Power

On Opinion, Power, and the Misuse of Attention

If we have an opinion about everything, then our overall power in the world is actually reduced. That’s interesting, because there is a lot of pressure these days to have an opinion about everything.

If there’s a war going on, if there’s some kind of news cycle that hits, if there’s something that moves political activists or social justice warriors, or something we’re told we should care about, many people feel as though they have to make their voice known. They feel they have to feel strongly, to have a charge around the situation.

What’s interesting is that this, in and of itself, actually reduces your ability to make a real impact in the world.

Each of us comes here with a certain set of gifts. Those gifts can either be amplified or have their volume turned down based on what we learn, what we practice, and what we experience in life. Even though we have innate gifts, places of least resistance where we can exert the most effective and efficient power in the world, that power is impacted by how we live.

A person who has an opinion about everything doesn’t really understand where their power is.

Just because there’s a war going on, for example, and people jump onto social media or their platforms and start shouting their opinions, doesn’t mean they’re making any meaningful impact. In fact, many of these people don’t actually know what they’re talking about.

That’s important to keep in mind. Just because you have an opinion doesn’t mean it’s a useful opinion, an informed opinion, or an opinion that carries real power.

Most people don’t understand foreign policy, warfare, or the complex economic, geographic, and political forces that come together to produce war. They don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes. War, and the factors that lead to it, are not things most people have deeply studied or truly understand.

Instead, they absorb a few news cycles, follow a handful of commentators, learn a small amount of what’s been made public, and suddenly feel they have something of value to say.

What ends up happening is that you expend a great deal of energy, all of the available energy at your disposal, in a way that accomplishes nothing and is not aligned with what you are actually capable of doing in the world.

Each of us comes here with a set of gifts, and we either amplify those gifts or diminish them through what we practice, what we experience, and what we learn. The real question is: where is your power, and what can you actually do?

What did you come here to do? What have you cultivated? Where is your true expertise? What is the arena where you can express your power effectively and efficiently?

It is in these arenas, the ones aligned with both our innate gifts and our cultivated expertise, that real power exists.

Power is a word that brings up a lot for people. I was talking with someone recently at an ecstatic dance, and I mentioned power. They laughed and said, “Oh, that word,” half joking, half serious, as if power immediately meant they needed to do trauma work.

But power is something we have to get comfortable with if we want to pursue destiny, because destiny is a path of power. Fate is not.

Fate consists of constricting circumstances, the conditions that limit us, tie us down, and restrict our movement, whether we like it or not. Destiny emerges from conscious engagement with fate.

Inside the process of moving through limiting circumstances, we find the thread of destiny. And in order to do that, we have to learn how to exert power.

What’s interesting is that limiting circumstances often teach us where our power is.

Someone who struggles with health challenges, for example, may be compelled to learn deeply about health. If they do so in a way aligned with their gifts, they develop a form of power that allows them to affect health as a domain of life.

Power is something we have to learn to recognize and inhabit.

The less we recognize our true power, and the more we waste our energy reacting to every event in the world where our opinion offers no real aid, the less we are actually doing what we came here to do. And the less good emerges from our lives as a result.