The Advice Nobody Can Actually Give You
CeeVee’s Corner | Editorial | Aug 2026
I’ve always believed this: making the right decisions and choices at various points in your life is the hardest yet most important work any of us does. Not the strategy, not the hustle, the decision itself. But the more I sit with this, the more I realise decisions aren’t really the thing. Judgement is. A decision is just the visible moment. Judgement is what you built over years to know which decision is actually right for you.
We are deeply irrational when it comes to decisions. Dan Ariely spent a career proving this in “Predictably Irrational,” showing how our irrationality isn’t random; it’s consistent, patterned, predictable. Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” makes a similar case from a different angle: most of our decisions run on fast, instinctive, emotional processing, not the slow, deliberate reasoning we like to imagine. I don’t think that’s something to fix. There’s nothing wrong with being irrational sometimes; being too rational can spoil a decision just as easily as being reckless can. What matters isn’t whether the process was rational. What matters is whether the judgement behind it was sound.
Sometimes irrationality is exactly right. Overrationalizing a decision can wreck it just as easily as recklessness can. I’ve noticed this in my own life: with financial decisions, I stay almost entirely rational. With relationship decisions, I let myself be irrational, and I think that’s normal. With business decisions, I try to hold both in balance, rational enough to see all sides, human enough to trust what the numbers can’t tell me.
As an entrepreneur, it’s the daily decisions along with the big ones together that decide the fate of your company. As a human being, it’s the same combination, daily plus long-term, that decides the fate of your life. In a relationship, it’s still the daily decisions that quietly shape what comes next. But every one of those decisions is downstream of judgement, the accumulated sense of what’s right for you, built from what you’ve actually lived through.
Somewhere along the way I noticed something about my own language, as I speak about decisions. I said, “I take decisions.” Not decisions happen to me. I take them intentionally. That’s how it should be. We can surround ourselves with hundreds of advisers, family members, friends and everyone will have an opinion on the best decision for us.
But one of the filters that I have when it comes to taking decisions amidst the noise of others’ opinions is this: “Has the person who is giving you opinions /advice done this before?“
Not read about it, not studied it, done it. Because that’s really what separates an opinion from judgement. Opinion is what someone thinks should work. Judgement is what someone knows works, because they’ve lived it.
I’ve had advisers telling me how to better run SheSight, do this, change that, pivot here. I’ve never listened to most of it. Why? Because they haven’t run a women’s magazine or women’s ecosystem the way I have. I understand this segment deeply, built over more than a decade of doing the work myself. So when a business consultant or adviser tells me what I should be doing, I listen, but I know it’s coming from their opinion or readings, not their judgement.
Two years ago, that judgement was exactly what told me to do something that looked completely irrational from the outside. I had to make a crucial decision regarding the continuity of SheSight Magazine. Financially, the business was bleeding, and by every rational measure, the advice I got was to close it down. But my gut told me the idea wasn’t wrong; the team and the business model were. So I rebuilt the business in a different model entirely. Today, even sitting in a different country, SheSight runs on a lean, efficient team of freelance collaborators who get things done and get them done profitably. On paper, shutting down a struggling team and starting over looks like the reckless move. But it wasn’t irrational to me. It was the most rational decision I could make, based on the judgement no adviser in that room had, because none of them had built what I’d built. Was I fearful? Yes, absolutely. Did I still do it? Yes, absolutely. Why? Coz I believed in myself.
The most successful decision makers I’ve met share one trait: their judgement is their own, built from their own research and experience. They’ll have the conversations, they’ll hear the opinions, but once their judgement is confirmed, they hold it, whatever it takes.
This is really the heart of it. Sometimes the only judgement that matters is your own. No adviser, however well-meaning, has walked your exact path or built what you’re building. That’s frightening, because it means the responsibility sits entirely with you. But it’s also freeing, because it means the power does too. Courage isn’t certainty. It’s trusting your judgement forward even when you don’t know if you’re right, because you know that if you’re wrong, your judgement is also what fixes it.
Your life exists in your mind before it exists anywhere else. No one else can fully see it, and no one else can build it for you. So the question isn’t why does everyone have an opinion; of course they do! The question is why hand them your judgement, when you’re the one who has actually done the work.
Making decisions is hard. But trusting your own judgement, and staying with it, is the real work.
For me, it’s become more like a game now, one where I trust what I know, and then I get it done, whatever anyone else says.
My Philosophy is this: Go do it. Then advise others. That’s it.
My latest book, The Judgement Economy, authored along with Rodney Beach, touches upon this vast resource of human judgement that every organisation can tap into in this AI Era. Check out the website www.thejudgementeconomy.com to receive a free author-signed copy for selected people.
Universal Love & Abundance
Dr.CeeVee
EDITORIAL BY
Dr. Chandra Vadhana R. (Dr. CeeVee) is an academic, author, entrepreneur, and impact strategist with a passion for empowering women, scaling social innovation, and embedding sustainability in business. With a PhD in management and over two decades of experience across academia and industry, she bridges education, entrepreneurship, and sustainability to create meaningful change. Dr. CeeVee is the founder of multiple purpose-driven ventures, including SheSight, ShePower Club, Prayaana Labs, and serves as a Senior Lecturer in Business at Monash University, Australia. Her work blends research, tech-enabled impact, and community building to shape a more equitable and regenerative future.
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