There are some real life “George” figures that I pay attention to. If they think something is a great idea and that’s in line with something I’m thinking about doing, I’ll take a hard look at what I might be missing since X’s judgment is usually terrible. In an odd way, their consistently bad judgment has proven a valuable tool.
Most of the best decisions of my life were the opposite decisions my parents would have made. They're not stupid people, but they grew up in a totally different time and place. Nowadays I sometimes ask for their advice as "inverse input."
I suspect part of this is that there are other parts of society (corporations) that are preying on their older intuition. It also means that as we get older, we should also question "obvious answers", because others will have learned to take advantage of them (and any accumulated wealth).
Yeah, I would like some qualifiers too because I've seen reddit hype up relatively obscure product niches at the time that later became popular with mainstream consumers.
There are some political figures I do this with - if I'm unsure about a issue, I'll do the opposite of what they say. Bernie Sanders is probably the biggest - even his own party usually votes the opposite of what he wants.
There are also some true idiots in the Republican party that work similarly.
