Most of us make decisions based on what other people will think. What will my parents say? What will my partner think? What will the neighbours make of it? We carry this invisible audience around with us and filter almost every choice through their eyes.

Here’s the truth: none of those people matter as much as you think. The only two opinions you should truly consider in most personal decisions are those of the eight-year-old version of you, and the eighty-year-old version.

Now, there’s a caveat to that. If your decision genuinely impacts the people around you, they absolutely factor in. The eight-year-old me would love nothing more than to live on a beach and swim all day, but that wouldn’t be fair on my son or my wife, and the eighty-year-old me would be disappointed for being that selfish. The two versions of yourself are a lens, not a licence. They work together.

The Eight-Year-Old You

Think about who you were at eight. Before making a living mattered. Before the mortgage, the bills, the responsibilities. Before someone told you to be realistic. That kid saw life for exactly what it was, full of possibility, adventure and excitement.

We lose that. Slowly, quietly, we let it go. And most of us don’t even notice until we look back and realise we can’t remember the last time we did something just because it excited us.

Eight-year-old me was obsessed with action man, adventure, being physical. Is it any coincidence I run marathons, swim, climb? That kid would be genuinely proud of the capable forty-year-old I’ve become. Your eight-year-old is probably different to mine, but stop once in a while and honestly ask whether they’d be proud of how you’re living. If the answer is no, it might be time to bring a bit more of them back.

The Eighty-Year-Old You

The other side of the lens is the older version of you, sitting in a chair, looking back on the whole thing. Not at the numbers on the balance sheet. Not at the car on the drive. At the life you actually lived.

I know this because I’ve seen it. In the last two years of my grandad’s life, he was born in 1917, lived through World War One and Two, and died at 98, I spent hours with him every day. At the time, I was just starting out in business and was storing stock in his shed. I listened to everything he said. And what I realised was this: not once did he talk about possessions or money. Every single thing he valued was a memory. Time spent with people he loved. A life filled with moments.

That shaped me more than almost anything else.

The Dubai Marathon

Here’s a decision I made recently that I think illustrates this better than any theory.

I entered the Dubai Marathon 2025 four weeks before the event , classic eight-year-old thinking, believes anything is possible. I then got ill for two of those four weeks, so training had been minimal to say the least. I flew out the day before, woke up jetlagged and late, and missed the start. By mile ten, my hip flexors were tightening. By mile twelve it had spread to my knees. By mile fourteen I was running with a limp.

Now I know myself. I could have pushed through. The time would have been terrible, but I’d have finished. We’re told to just keep going, crawl over the line if you have to. And I’ll admit, that’s a mindset I can fall into.

But I stopped and asked: will the eighty-year-old me be proud of this moment? Will he thank me for grinding through a race that was a disaster from the start, at a pace slower than I’d run before, on knees that were already shot?

The answer was a firm no. So I stopped. It hurt my ego at the time. Looking back, it was absolutely the right call.

The Moments That Actually Matter

When my son was born, I heard a Jordan Peterson interview where he said you only have little kids for four years, and if you miss it, it’s gone. That hit me hard. My wife and I made a decision right then, for those early years, time with him came first.

We sold our cars, cut back on material things, and travelled the world together as a family. The business still ran. It still grew. Would it have grown faster if I’d put it first? Without question. But what is the eighty-year-old me going to value more, another zero on a balance sheet, or those memories we made?

Retiring my wife when my son was born, and the time we created together as a family, those are two of the proudest things in my life. Not the Porsche. Not the Rolex. I bought both and later sold them because they felt ridiculous. What I kept was the time.

What People Regret At The End

Bronnie Ware spent years as a palliative care nurse and recorded the most common regrets people share at the end of their lives. They are worth sitting with:

1. Not having the courage to live a life true to themselves, rather than the life others expected of them.
2. Wishing they hadn’t worked so hard, and had spent more time with the people they loved.
3. Wishing they had expressed their feelings more, instead of suppressing them to keep the peace.
4. Letting valuable friendships fade away through neglect.
5. Wishing they had let themselves be happier, realising too late that happiness was a choice.

Read that list again. None of it is about money, status, or achievement. All of it is about how they lived.

Use Both Lenses

This is a technique I use for almost every significant decision. I look at it through both lenses. Does it excite me? Would the eight-year-old me have been thrilled by it? And when I’m looking back at eighty — will I be grateful I did it, or will I quietly regret it?

I genuinely think it’s one of the most underrated decision-making tools there is. It cuts through the noise. It strips away the opinions of people who won’t be there at the end anyway. And it gets you back to who you actually are.

It’s so easy to get lost in the chase — money, status, climbing the ladder. But I’m almost certain that wasn’t what the eight-year-old you had in mind. And having spent real time with older people, I’m yet to meet one who wished they’d worked more.

Remember when you used to play in the woods? When a walk by the river or a trip to the seaside was genuinely exciting? Try to find those moments again. Carve them out deliberately. Because in the end, they are all we really have.

Two versions of you are watching. Make them both proud.