Joe points out a fundamental impossibility: you can never know which of your contributions will matter to someone else. He regularly says things off the cuff that people reference as life-changing years later — things he doesn’t even remember saying. Meanwhile, the moments he thinks are his most profound land with nobody.
This means the entire project of evaluating whether your input is “valuable enough” is built on sand. You can’t know. Nobody can. Value is perception, and it’s distributed unpredictably across your audience. Some people will have epiphanies. Some will be bored. This is just how life works.
“Who are you to judge if your input is valuable?”
“I say shit off the cuff and people come to me three years later and they’re like, ‘Oh my god, that thing you said to me.’ And I don’t even remember what the hell I said.”
The need to pre-evaluate your own worth before speaking is itself a form of arrogance — assuming you can predict how reality will unfold for other people. Letting go of that judgment frees you to simply show up and contribute.
Related Concepts
- Wanting to control others’ perception of you is absurd
- Self-judgment defends against emotions
- Judgment signals unfelt emotion
- Good teachings inevitably get corrupted into new moralities
- Hearing objections before deciding — even if you decide the same thing — changes everything
- Saying ‘ouch’ to the inner critic creates distance from it