#5: Question Authority & So-Called “Experts”
Today, Dr. Steve Orma discusses the critical importance of questioning authority figures and so-called experts in order to achieve massive goals and big dreams. Dr. Orma explains who these authorities and experts typically are, the pitfalls of blindly following their advice, and why it is crucial to question and process their guidance through your own mind, values, and goals. He shares personal stories and practical tips on how to effectively apply this principle in daily life and make better decisions towards achieving your goals.
In this episode you’ll learn:
What is an “authority” or “expert”?
Why questioning authority and experts is critical to achieving anything great in life
4 powerful reasons WHY you should question experts (and how it will massively benefit you)
How to start questioning experts in your own life to get what you want
Remember, you can achieve ANYTHING you want!
Steve Orma
SUBSCRIBE
00:00 Introduction to the Insane Goals Podcast
00:49 Defining Authority and Experts
01:48 The Importance of Questioning Authority
05:04 Real-Life Examples of Questioning Authority
12:07 Practical Tips for Applying This Principle
16:50 Conclusion and Next Steps
RESOURCES
(Book) The Great Cholesterol Myth
Need help achieving your goals? Work with me
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Introduction to the Insane Goals Podcast
Welcome to the Insane Goals Podcast. I'm Dr. Steve Orma, clinical psychologist and goal achieving specialist. Each week I discuss how to achieve massive goals, smash conventional thinking, and give you a radically different vision of what's possible for your life right now.
In today's episode, I want to talk about questioning authority and so-called experts and why this is critical to achieving insane goals and achieving any sort of big dreams in your life.
So I'm going to first define what I mean by this, what I mean by questioning authority and experts and teach you the principle. Then I'm going to go over why you should do this and why this is so important to being able to achieve really huge things in your life and not being stuck. And then go over some tips on how to actually apply this in your life.
Defining “Authority” and “Experts”
So first of all, what do I mean by authority or experts? So authority would be people in any kind of positions of authority or power. So this could be parents, [00:01:00] it could be your teachers, it could be scientists, political leaders, managers or bosses.
So anybody that's in a position of authority that has some kind of a power or authority over you. And what I mean by experts are people who are called experts in something, in some field. It might be doctors or lawyers or an accountant. And many times this is people with impressive degrees or credentials. People that have won lots of awards or certifications. People who are featured a lot in the press. And they're called experts. They're referred to as experts.
And in general, what I'm saying here is to question the guidance, the advice and the opinions of these people. Really, you should do this with everybody, including your friends, your family. Everybody, you should question their opinions, their advice, and their guidance.
The Importance of Questioning Authority
Now why is this so important? Why should you question these people and why is it critical to achieving amazing things in your life and achieving an incredible life? And how will this benefit you by doing it?
Well, first of all, [00:02:00] most people don't question authority or people in positions of power. They just either follow them blindly or they think, well, this person has this degree or this credential or they're in this really important position. Therefore, that means they know a lot or they know more than me and I should listen to them and not question it. And this is a huge mistake.
And this is one thing that keeps people stuck. This is one thing that ends up causing people a lot of pain in their life because they're following advice that is wrong or it's not right for them.
So why should you question these people? First of all, just because they're in an authority position or a position of power or have impressive credentials or are considered an expert by someone or somebody or the press doesn't mean they actually know much about what they do or are right about everything. you've probably experienced this at some point in your life where you have gone to a professional or you were told a person was an expert and then you listen to them and you [00:03:00] think they don't really seem to know much about what they're talking about or it's just sort of generic advice that you've heard before.
What a lot of people do when they want to become a business person or an entrepreneur is they will go and get an MBA. They'll try to get into a place like Harvard Business School or Wharton or one of these very prestigious business schools because they think well if I go to that school and I get an MBA that that's going to make me a really good business person that's going to give me a foundation of skills and that's going to get me toward my goal.
So if your goal is to be an entrepreneur or start and build a successful business, a lot of times people will follow authority or go towards people that have impressive credentials like PhDs or, you know, they teach at Harvard and think, well, they know more than me. I need to go and go through that and get my MBA in order for me to be successful as an entrepreneur and starting and running a business.
In my opinion, this is wrong. That if you [00:04:00] want to become an entrepreneur and you want to start and build a business, then what you should do is go and build a business and learn from the ground up how to start and run a business. And then yes, if there are things that you don't know that you want to learn, then find another entrepreneur, someone who is actually doing what you want to do and learn from them. Model what they're doing, or there are really good online courses now from people who do know what they're talking about to learn certain parts of running a business like creating a product or sales or marketing. You do not need to go to college or university or get an MBA to learn how to start a business.
And what I would argue is that that will just slow you down and get in your way. Because if you look up the people who are actually teaching in these schools, they are not business people. They are not entrepreneurs. They're academics who are writing articles for journals and they're teaching courses and they have PhDs and they're probably very smart people, but a lot of them have never even started a business before. So it just does not make [00:05:00] sense to go to school to learn how to become an entrepreneur.
Real-Life Examples of Questioning Authority
Second reason why you should question authority and experts is they may not have the same values or goals as you do. So when an expert is giving you advice or guidance on what you should do, they're coming from their perspective of their values and what they think is important and how they see the world. And sometimes that might align with yours as well, but a lot of times it doesn't. So for example, about 10 years ago, I went to my doctor and I got my usual yearly labs and my cholesterol was high.
What my doctor advised me, after just seeing the cholesterol number, was I should go on a statin drug. And a statin drug is a drug that you take to lower your cholesterol.
Now, whether someone should take a statin drug or not is a medical question and I'm not going to say it's wrong to take statins for everybody or it's right to take statins. I think there are certain situations where someone should. The point here is I questioned it. I didn't just follow her blindly and say, [00:06:00] okay, and have her write me a prescription for a statin drug and go out and start taking it.
Because, my values are I don't want to take a medication if I don't have to. I don't have any problem with medication. Medications can be really good sometimes, but medications also have really bad side effects and they can undermine your health. And if you don't need to take a medication for something, then you shouldn't because it's going to make your health worse, not better.
So what I did was I did my own research and I read a couple of really good books that kind of gave us a different opinion on cholesterol and statin drugs because the conventional wisdom is if your cholesterol is high, you should take a statin drug. Is that always the case and is that really true and what's that based on? So I wanted to educate myself. So I got a book and I don't remember the name of the book right now, but I'll look it up and if I can find it, I'll put that into the show notes. But basically I did not want to take a drug and I wanted to make sure before I took a drug that it made sense.
And I read this book and I was [00:07:00] convinced that it was not right for me to take the statin drug and that what I should do is change some things that I'm doing in my diet. And that's what I did. And when I did that, I was able to lower my cholesterol quite a bit without taking the drug just by changing my diet.
And there's also a lot of things that I learned about cholesterol. That it's not just good cholesterol, bad cholesterol. There's a lot of more fine detail in terms of cholesterol that doctors, don't tell you about or they don't know about because they just sort of learn what they learn in medical school and then if they're not very diligent or motivated in their job, they don't really read or learn beyond that and they just give you the conventional wisdom which is here take a drug.
A lot of times what doctors will do is just tell you to take a drug or they'll recommend surgery. And sometimes that might be the right advice, but quite often it's not. And this is why you want to think for yourself and question because that's going to affect your life.
Now another reason why you want to question authority and people who are considered experts are they may not be that good at what they [00:08:00] do. Just because someone is in a position of authority or they have a degree or a certification or they've won awards or people call them an expert doesn't mean they're actually good at what they do.
And an example here is a few years ago, my wife and I, we, uh, we had an accountant that we work with for, 10 years and he was great and , you know, he worked really well with us , and it was aligned with our goals and things like that for our money.
But he was retiring and so we had to find a new accountant. So we found this accountant. And this guy was a seasoned accountant. He had decades of experience. He had all the certifications. He had his license and all this kind of stuff. And we started working with him and we could just tell he was not that good at what he did. He knew all the laws and all this kind of stuff, but he didn't know a lot about our particular situation.
We were living in another country. We had our own businesses, and we were doing contracting work and we had more complications in terms of our taxes that he didn't really know much about. He was sort of a conventional accountant that worked [00:09:00] with people who lived in the United States, who were kind of more working professionals, and wasn't good for us.
Now, if we hadn't questioned that, if we hadn't thought, you know, is this guy going to be good for us? Is he giving us the advice that's actually going to help us? We would have just stuck with him and followed what he said, and that would have hurt us financially. Instead, we talked about it, we thought through it, and we realized he wasn't going to be a good fit for us in terms of an accountant.
Because we wanted to be able to, you know, do the best we could financially with what we earned, and we wanted to be able to have personalized, specialized service that was aligned with our lifestyle and the way that we were earning money. And because we needed that to achieve our financial goals and dreams.
So again, in this area, which is the area of money and finances, it's critically important to think for yourself and to question authority and advice that you're given because it's going to really affect your life.
And the last point I'll make here, the last reason why it's [00:10:00] so critical to question authority and advice from experts is that it's your life that their advice and guidance will affect. So when you go to a doctor or an accountant or a lawyer or a therapist or whatever it is, and you're going to them to get advice or guidance on your problem or your goal, and they give you that advice and they say this is what you should do. If you apply what they tell you, it is you that's going to bear the consequences.
Those consequences might be positive if the advice they're giving you is good. And sometimes it is. I'm not saying never trust authority. We'll go over how you actually discern between what you should follow and what you shouldn't follow. But most people lean toward following and not questioning. And that's really what I want to emphasize is that's critically important to do and that the reason is because it's going to affect your life, not theirs.
If I take a statin drug, it's not going to affect my doctor's life at all. It's going to affect my life. I'm putting it in my body. If I follow my [00:11:00] accountant and what they say, it's going to affect my financial situation, not his. He's getting paid either way. So you suffer the consequences and that's why you want to be really careful even if you're going to an expert to get advice and guidance to help you in your life, you still want to question everything they tell you.
So for example, if you go to a business school and you just go because that's what people do, they get MBAs when they want to be an entrepreneur and you follow that blindly, well, you're going to spend two years of your life and your time in that school. You're going to be spending quite often more than $100,000 to get that, you know, certification or diploma. And you're going to suffer the consequences if the advice and stuff that you're learning is actually not helping you achieve your goal. That's all just going to be a waste. And it's the same with blindly following your doctor or your accountant.
The benefits of not doing that is that you question what you're told, you don't just follow it blindly. And you think about it in terms of your own life, your own values, your own goals. And when you do that, you're [00:12:00] gonna make much better decisions that are gonna lead you to achieve the goals, the dreams that you have in your life much more effectively.
Practical Tips for Applying This Principle
So I'm going to briefly go over here some ways to start applying this in your life, but I'm going to also record a separate episode and go into more depth about how you actually apply this principle in your life.
And I introduced a new series last week called Insane Tools, which is , when I present a principle like questioning authority or questioning experts, I want to dive into that and explain to you what that means, why that's so important and why that's critical to achieving insane goals and building a life that you love.
And then I actually want to give you a tool or a method or a skill for how to start applying that in your life. Because, you know, it's great to know a principle. It's great to know why you should do it, but if you don't know how to actually apply it, in your life, in action, starting now, every day, and make it a part of your life, then it's going to be kind of useless to you.
I've already kind of mentioned several things that you want to do to start applying this in your life. Just [00:13:00] questioning alone is an action, meaning you don't want to just follow blindly what you're told by experts or authority figures, no matter who they are, no matter what their credentials are, no matter what they got their degree from, no matter how famous they are. You want to question what they tell you. You can listen to what they say, you take it in, and really understand what they're telling you to do, and then after, you want to think it through, and question it, and process it through your own mind, and ask yourself, does this make sense? And why does it make sense? Or why doesn't it make sense? Does this align with my values? You want to go through that processing before you actually act on it and apply it. Before you go and apply and go to an MBA program, before you start taking a drug, before you just follow your accountant's advice, or whatever the situation is, you want to process it through your own mind.
A lot of people are afraid to do this because they don't trust their own mind. They don't think they're smart enough to be able to think it through and figure it out on their own because I don't have the impressive degree, not the [00:14:00] famous person, this person is the one that's in the position of authority, who am I to know what I should do? I should just follow them because they're smarter, better, have more power, more experience than me.
Quite often this is not true. You're underselling yourself. You're underselling your own mind and ability to think, which is a key principle I'm teaching on this podcast is you have the same mind and the same ability as any of these experts and people and you don't want to look at yourself as not equal to them in terms of that.
Now sure they might have more knowledge and yes they might be experts and they might have really really good advice for you that can really benefit your life. But the point is you want to always process it through your own mind when you get advice and see does it make sense?
And this goes for this podcast. I am giving you advice, I'm giving you guidance. I have a degree in clinical psychology and you shouldn't just follow what I'm telling you in this blindly. Ask yourself when I present an episode or I present a principle, does [00:15:00] that make sense? Have I found that to be true in my experience? Is that different from what I've heard people say before? What's the reasoning behind that?
This is why when I present a principle, I don't just tell you go and do this. I'm not just telling you do this and follow me and follow me blindly. I'm saying, this is what I believe is an important thing to do in your life if you want to be really successful and you want to achieve really big goals.
And then I give you the rationale. I give you the reasoning behind it and why, and I give you lots of concrete examples. And that is what you want to look for.
You know, like when you go to your doctor, a really good thing to do when they give you advice is ask them, why? Why should I do it? And question anything that doesn't make sense to you. And if they don't give you a very good answer, or if they get defensive, that's a really bad sign. It means they're not even sure why they're giving you that advice, or they're insecure about it. If they can't explain it to you and give you a good rationale, and give you an answer of why you should do what they're telling you to do in plain terms, in [00:16:00] terms that you can understand, a 10 year old can understand, then there's something off there. Then do not trust that advice because it means a lot of the time that they don't know what they're talking about, or they haven't thought the issue through themselves, or actually looked at the reasoning behind it. If They were just taught it in medical school at some point and they just swallowed it without questioning it themselves. And they're just passing it on to you.
And because again, it's your life. These are big things, your finances, your career dreams, like becoming an entrepreneur or whatever it is. Your health. These are huge values and what you do, if you take the advice of these people without processing it through and going through that process of questioning it and doing your due diligence, it's only going to hurt you and affect your life and many times the people in your life that love you. It's going to affect them as well.
Conclusion and Next Steps
Okay, so that's some ways that you could get started applying this principle today. Have this in your mind as you go through your day when you go to your doctor, when you talk to your accountant.
[00:17:00] Now obviously when you're in a certain situation I'll just say as a side note if you're in a job and you have a manager and they're telling you you have to do it, yeah, sometimes there's some leeway and you can you know, push back or you can sort of negotiate. But sometimes you can't because it's their company or they're the person in authority and that's the rule in the company or that's the culture and you can't go against it even if you disagree with it.
But what you do want to do in your own mind is think, what do I believe? Do I agree with this? Is this a good policy? And then if it gets to a point where your values and what you think is right, conflicts that much with where you work, then you might want to start thinking about, is this a good fit for me? And then start thinking about making a change or going off on your own.
The point here is to start questioning and using your mind as a filter, to process what people are telling you to do or the advice they're giving you through your own mind and learning to build the trust in your own mind.
All right, stay tuned for the next episode where I'll go over the insane tool for how you do this in a more systematic way. If you [00:18:00] love the show, then subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss the new episodes that come out every Tuesday. And also share it with people that you love or your friends that you think could benefit from the podcast.
Thanks for listening to the Insane Goals podcast. You can find all the resources and links for this episode in the show notes at https://www.drorma.com/podcast. And remember, you can achieve ANYTHING you want in life. No limits, no BS, and no excuses. I’ll see you next time.