A friend rang me last week about his business partner, a guy who had quietly stopped pulling his weight. Ninety seconds in, I had it mapped out. Have the conversation you’ve been avoiding. Put real numbers on the table before you sit down for it. Stop calling it a personality clash when it is a money problem.
Crisp. Confident. Genuinely useful advice, if I say so myself.
Then I hung up, looked at a situation of my own that rhymed almost line for line, and my brain turned into wet cardboard.
It turns out this phenomenon has a name.
The king who couldn’t take his own advice
Psychologists call it Solomon’s paradox, after the biblical king whose judgement people travelled across the ancient world to hear, and whose own household was a slow-motion disaster. Wise for everyone else. A shambles at home.
Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross put the idea to the test in three experiments with 693 people. Participants reasoned through a relationship betrayal, either their own or a friend’s. When the problem belonged to somebody else, they reasoned well: they admitted the limits of what they actually knew, weighed the other person’s side, allowed that the situation might change, and went looking for a compromise. Put those same people in front of their own conflict, and every bit of that reasoning disappeared.
The part that stung me was the age finding. Older participants were no better at it. Decades of experience bought no immunity whatsoever.
Why the view from inside is so terrible
Here is my theory, and it is not a flattering one. When the problem is yours, you are not analysing it. You are defending it.
You also know too much. From outside, you see the shape of a mess. From inside, you see the texture, and texture is where excuses live. Every extenuating circumstance, every reason this month was unusual, every bit of history that makes the obvious move feel cruel.
I sold my small restaurant chain during the pandemic, and one of those sites should have been shut eleven months before I finally did it. I could have told you exactly why the numbers were bad and exactly why they were about to turn. Any stranger with a calculator would have called it in an afternoon. I knew the place’s whole life story, and the story kept talking me out of the arithmetic.
Talk about yourself like you’re someone else
The fix in that original research was almost embarrassingly simple. People were asked to think about their own problem from a distance, as an observer rather than a participant. The gap closed.
Grossmann’s team later ran this as an actual habit. Participants kept a diary for a month, half writing about their day in the first person and half in the third, referring to themselves by name. The third-person group came out measurably wiser in how they reasoned about their own conflicts, according to the University of Waterloo write-up of the study. The technique has a lovely old name, illeism, and it sounds ridiculous in practice.
“Daniel is annoyed because he thinks he’s being taken for granted.” Say that out loud and you will feel like a lunatic. You will also notice, immediately, that the sentence contains a claim you cannot prove.
The question that actually works
My version is blunter. What would I tell a friend who brought me this exact situation and wasn’t allowed to add a single excuse?
Write the answer down on paper, addressed to an actual person, in the tone you’d use with someone you liked. Left in your head, it stays vague and gets renegotiated on the walk home.
Then read it back. Notice how short it is. Advice for other people always comes out short; the version we write for ourselves sprawls for paragraphs and lands on “so it’s complicated,” which is usually just a longer way of saying we’d rather not.
Give the advice you need to hear
There is a stranger trick that goes the other direction. Researchers at Chicago Booth and Penn found that people struggling with a goal got more out of giving advice than receiving it. Middle schoolers who coached younger kids on staying motivated put in more study time afterwards than the ones who got tips from expert teachers. Across four other domains, from saving money to managing a temper, the advice-givers came out more motivated too.
Almost everyone predicts the opposite, assuming they need an expert. What actually works is being put in a position to say the true thing out loud to someone who deserves to hear it.
So find someone a step behind you on the exact thing you’re stuck on, and help them. You will hear yourself say something you have been dodging for months.
I rang my friend back a fortnight later and made him repeat my own advice to me, in his words, about my situation. It landed completely differently coming from a voice that was not mine. He also did not let me add the caveats.
Wisdom, as far as I can tell, is not a thing you accumulate. It is a seat you happen to be sitting in. Get up, walk around to the other side of the table, and have a look from there.
