Success Quote by Peter McWilliams

McWilliams rigs the question like a small moral trap: you can answer it in a sentence, but you have to admit something about yourself to do it. The hyphen in "important-your" reads like a quick inhale, a pivot from the tidy language of self-help into something more confrontational. He is not asking you to pick between two equal values. He is forcing you to notice that "others' opinions" can quietly masquerade as prudence, realism, even "being informed", while actually functioning as a leash.

The intent is diagnostic. If your goal is genuinely yours, the social weather around it is just that: weather. If your goal is built out of approval, then it's not a goal so much as a performance with a to-do list. The subtext is that people rarely abandon dreams because they lack discipline; they abandon them because they can't tolerate the status hit of looking foolish, naive, or out of step. McWilliams frames that fear as a choice, which is bracing because it denies the alibi of "I had no option."

Context matters: McWilliams wrote in an era when self-actualization language was becoming mainstream, but he also lived through intense public scrutiny tied to his activism and legal battles. That gives the line an edge. It's less "follow your bliss" than "decide who gets to author your life". By making "others" plural and abstract, he points at the faceless committee we carry around in our heads - the imagined audience that edits our ambitions before we ever take the first step.