Advice to My Younger Self: The Importance of Critical Thinking

So I would tell my younger self to think about what the big brands are really offering and where the most growth potential exists. In my own experience as a manager, I have watched many early-career professionals who worked at smaller and less well-known companies assume greater levels of responsibility much sooner than their peers at larger organizations, and build their ability to think strategically, execute on plans, and solve problems more rapidly.

I have also seen a number of these early-career professionals outgrow their peers at large corporations within a few years because they developed a greater level of adaptability, sense of ownership, and willingness to learn early on.

If I had possessed stronger analytical skills while evaluating roles, I would have been able to look beyond superficial indicators (like company size) to assess roles specifically based on depth of responsibility and potential for growth, and this type of evaluation would ultimately result in better decisions regarding careers and more resilient decision-making.

It would be to slow down and question my first impulse. Early on, I rushed into roles, projects, and commitments without pausing to weigh in on the real costs. The mistake I often made was to favor speed over decisiveness.

In technical work, especially engineering, I’ve learned that true clarity comes from designing not just for success but for failure. Asking, “If this breaks, how? What ripples out? Who gets hit?” Now, when I apply the same rigor to personal choices, from jobs to risks and pivots, I’m spared so much regret while building real preparedness.

Strong decisions emerge from mapping best outcomes and worst-case scenarios, then preparing and steeling yourself for both. It sharpens judgment, breeds resilience, and turns hesitation into confident foresight. What a game-changer that mindset would have been from the start!

“Tune into the silence as much as the noise” seems like just the bit of advice my younger self missed out on!

Early in my career, I zeroed in on the loud signals, from clicks and conversions to vocal feedback, dismissing “no input” as a glitch or null value to patch over. But silence isn’t absence; it’s data, a deliberate signal of friction, refusal, or disengagement. I wish I’d grasped sooner that missingness reveals user intent more sharply than any metric.

Spotting this would have transformed my decisions. Instead of assuming no complaints meant a feature was humming along, I’d probe, “Is the quiet a sign of passive acceptance, or users stuck in a silent void of poor design? Actively refusing to engage?” This critical lens shifts you from reacting to visible data to decoding hidden behaviors.

The payoff? Designs that don’t just chase happy paths but anticipate the voids. You’d build in flags for skipped steps, model refusal as predictive, and turn non-events into actionable insights. No more shipping “successes” that quietly fail. This awareness builds resilient systems. And sharper judgment.

I would tell my younger self to treat critical thinking as a daily discipline when the path is unclear. In my first year of entrepreneurship, I faced self-doubt, skepticism, financial strain, and conflicting feedback from early customers. Stronger analytical skills would have helped me sort useful signals from noise, test assumptions, and avoid swinging with every opinion. It would have led to steadier decisions that aligned with my vision while acknowledging real constraints. That balance makes the journey more manageable and keeps momentum even when there is no guaranteed roadmap.

Lead with decision hygiene. Before you get feedback and input, neutralize it by quarantining your own opinions and keeping your cards close to your chest. When I was early in my career, I get feedback and input on projects and ideas I was working on, but I make the mistake of leading with my own opinions on the initiative before soliciting the others’ thoughts for it to be a bit more “transparent.” However, in hindsight, I realized that incessantly doing this leads to influencing people’s opinions, whether they mirror them mindlessly or don’t express honest views by contradicting me fully ergo leading to suboptimal decisions with blind spots.

I learned that you need to “keep requests for feedback neutral” or “keep your cards close to your chest” to get honest feedback if you want critical thinking insights. It’s a type of decision hygiene, which is how you frame requests for feedback to obtain unbiased information. With my team, for example, we do get opinions individually before we discuss as a group so that we don’t fall into the “groupthink” trap easily. Everyone will share thoughts in writing, which are then inputted into a document anonymously, so cross-checking of ideas and evaluation will be based on what they are themselves objectively, not influenced by who submitted them. Doing this always uncovers insights and risks I personally would never have flagged if we talked about it openly from the start.

If you have a big decision to make, whether it’s choosing a career path, between two job offers during a job search, or launching a new initiative, ask for a few people’s opinions while keeping what you want to do a secret. Ask more neutral questions and keep your phrasing open and unbiased, like “What would you say about this situation?” instead of saying “I’m thinking about doing X, do you think it’s a good idea?” when consulting people. Don’t make any conclusions either until you have identified common themes and unexpected insights in the responses you get. Practicing this degree of neutrality regardless even as junior professionals in our respective fields will increase the quality of your decision each time, and prevent you from falling in the “groupthink trap” so easily. This type of decision hygiene can improve the accuracy of your decisions, especially when it comes to hiring and product-related decisions, by about 20% because it uncovers more red flags just by keeping opinions separate until the facts speak for themselves.

I’d tell my younger self to ask more questions and think through decisions carefully. At the start of my career, I acted on what seemed obvious without considering all the factors. Developing analytical skills sooner would have helped me make more informed decisions and better understand situations before acting. Critical thinking is about seeing the full picture and making decisions with confidence.