How to avoid getting influenced by others?

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Acharya Prashant: The question is from Simone from the Netherlands and it says, “I easily get influenced by others. How do I learn to stand my ground?”

The mind is a crying vacancy. It is an undue emptiness. It is an unclean half-filled emptiness. The mind will always need someone to be with. The mind will always need stuff to hold; material, objects to fill itself up with. So, the problem really is not that somebody influences you; you will have to be influenced by somebody, you see. It is impossible to not allow anybody to enter you, penetrate you, rather engulf you. You need that; that’s an inner demand. It is a psychological imperative. The question is, who is it that you allow to enter you, occupy you, and command you. The option to not allow anybody is not there. Somebody is needed. Now that somebody really cannot be a person, a thought, an idea, or a thing from this world.

I say that because all of us have repeatedly tried that and failed. There is nothing in the entire universe that has not been tried in ways subtle or gross as means for inner fulfillment, and those means have never succeeded. So, that somebody cannot be somebody or something. That’s the reason the abstraction called God or Truth had to be invented by man. We…