Chapter 9

Privacy and Discretion

Keep your life to yourself, and value your privacy. You do not need to share every part of your life with other people, and you should never feel obliged to explain yourself simply because somebody is curious. There is strength in knowing what belongs in public and what should remain yours alone.

Keep your plans close to your chest while you are still building them. There is rarely anything to be gained by announcing what you intend to do before you have done it. The more people you tell, the more opinions you invite: encouragement perhaps, but also criticism, envy, interference and doubt. None of these will do the work for you. Make your plans carefully, get on with them quietly and let the results speak when there is something worth showing.

The same discretion should apply to your finances, opportunities, relationships, family life, and personal struggles. Not everything you think or feel needs to be shared. Your family’s private affairs are not material for casual conversation, and neither are the confidences of the people who trust you. If somebody tells you something in confidence, guard it as carefully as you would want them to guard something entrusted to them by you.

Be particularly careful about revealing your financial circumstances. People do not need to know what you earn, what you own, what you have saved, or what you intend to buy. Money can change the way people see you and, occasionally, what they expect from you. The less people know about what you have, the easier it is to know that they value you for who you are rather than for what they imagine they might gain from knowing you.

Privacy also protects something even more important: your independence of judgement. When you have an important choice to make, resist the temptation to ask everybody else what they think you should do. Every person sees the world through the filter of his own experiences, fears, prejudices, ambitions, and limitations. However well-intentioned somebody may be, their advice inevitably contains something of themselves. Once you invite that opinion into your thinking, it can be surprisingly difficult to remove it. The fundamental point here is that this matters because advice can introduce doubt where none previously existed. You may have considered the facts carefully and instinctively know which course is right for you, only to become uncertain after hearing somebody else’s fears or objections. Before long, you are no longer deciding what you believe is right; you are deciding between the competing opinions of other people. The result is that you may pass up an opportunity or make the wrong decision, not because your original judgement was flawed, but because you allowed somebody else’s doubts and biases to distort it.

Be particularly careful about seeking advice simply because you are frightened of making the wrong decision. Asking more people does not necessarily produce a better answer. Often, it merely produces more possibilities, more conflicting opinions, and more doubt. You can end up so influenced by what everybody else thinks that you lose sight of what you thought in the first place.

There is also a danger in seeking advice for validation. It’s easy to keep asking around until someone finally tells you what you want to hear. Equally, do not ask others to make difficult decisions for you so that you can escape responsibility if things go wrong. Some decisions belong to you, and part of becoming a man is learning to make them.

So, when a decision is yours to make, first think for yourself. Establish the facts. Consider the consequences. Decide what matters to you and what principles should govern your choice. Give yourself the silence and space necessary to reach your own conclusion before exposing it to the opinions of others. Very often, you already know the answer; what you lack is the confidence to trust your own judgement.

This does not mean ignoring expertise from somebody who genuinely understands the subject. There is an important difference between obtaining information you do not possess and asking another person to decide how you should live your life. Seek knowledge when you need knowledge; do not seek opinions merely because you lack confidence in your own decision.

Ultimately, nobody else has to live your life. The person advising you will not bear the full consequences if the decision proves wrong, nor will they live with the opportunities you surrender because you followed their fears instead of your own judgement. Listen when there is something worth learning, but never surrender responsibility for your decisions to the crowd.

Privacy therefore gives you freedom. It gives you room to think without interference, to form your own judgement without constantly seeking validation, and to pursue a course without having to defend it to people who have no responsibility for the outcome.

Privacy should not, however, become secrecy for its own sake. There is an important difference. Privacy means exercising judgement about what you share, when you share it, and with whom. Secrecy can become dishonesty, isolation, or a means of avoiding legitimate accountability. Never use privacy as an excuse to deceive the people who have a genuine right to know something, particularly when your decisions directly affect their lives.

Nor does independence mean refusing help when you genuinely need it. There will be occasions when another person’s knowledge or perspective is valuable. The lesson is not that you should never listen to anybody. It is that you should be deliberate about whose voice you allow into your thinking and why.

Be wary, too, of broadcasting your life simply for attention. You do not need an audience for everything you accomplish, everywhere you go, or everything you own. A life does not become more valuable because other people have seen it. Some of the best things you will ever experience will matter precisely because they belong only to you and the people you love.

A degree of mystery is no bad thing either. When people know every detail of your ambitions, finances, relationships, difficulties, and opinions, you surrender something unnecessarily. You also give other people information with which to judge you, influence you, or, occasionally, take advantage of you. You cannot control what somebody does with information once you have given it to them, so think carefully before giving it away.

Above all, do not spend your life explaining yourself. Be accountable where accountability is owed, admit your mistakes when you make them, and listen when there is a genuine reason to listen. But you do not owe the wider world a running commentary on your decisions. Live your life like a game of chess: execute your moves silently, let your achievements speak for themselves, and only speak to declare checkmate. Your life is yours to live. Do not allow the noise of other people’s opinions to drown out your own judgement.