In business or in relationships, telling someone your problems, more often than not, elicits an opinion on how to solve them. When I do hear someone’s advice on how to deal with whatever I’m struggling with, I ask myself the following questions:

Where is it coming from? No matter how reasonable it sounds, I only give an opinion as much weight as I give the judgment of its messenger. If my mother, who hasn’t held a job in thirty years, is giving me advice on navigating office politics, I take it with more than a grain of salt. If I get the same advice from a mentor who has risen to an executive position with dozens of employees working under him? That’s another story.

Does this person have an agenda? Even if it’s not malicious, people have a tendency to give advice that conforms to their worldview. A close friend, who has never taken a risk in his life, told me regularly before I started my own business that it will probably fail and I should stay in the predictable job I already had. While his heart may have been in the right place, it wasn’t exactly an unbiased observation. Whether or not he realized it, he wanted to believe that risk taking led to failure, so that he wouldn’t have to question his own life decisions. Think about how someone’s opinion plays into their broader worldview.

Which path would I most regret not taking? I’ve written about regret before, but I truly believe it is one of life’s most powerful motivators. For me, regrets of opportunities missed always seem to outweigh regrets of a chance that didn’t work out. When I’m struggling between two roads to take, I flip the equation around: if I follow one, how much will I regret not taking the other? In most cases, the greater answer is the one most worth taking.

Have your cake and eat it too. I know, I can’t even make it through a few hundred words without a cliché of my own, but in this case it may be true. There are rare times in life when, with a little hard work or ingenuity, you can follow both paths. In my company, I was waiting for one path to begin, knowing that if it didn’t work out I had a pivot already in mind. Eventually, I realized that if I could work a little harder and plan carefully, I could pursue both at once, which saved both time and money.