Solomon's Paradox: Why You Give Great Advice to Others but Not Yourself
This piece explores Solomon's paradox โ the well-documented tendency to reason more clearly about other people's problems than our own, because our own struggles are tangled up with fear, personal history, and ego. It explains how creating psychological distance from a situation restores clarity, and offers a simple writing exercise: retell your problem in the third person, then ask what you'd tell a friend facing it. The core takeaway is that wisdom isn't missing, it's just blocked by closeness, and a small shift in perspective can reveal the obvious answer you already know.
Watch VideoWhy You Can Solve Everyone Else's Problems but Not Your Own
Have you ever noticed how effortless it is to diagnose what's wrong with a friend's life? They hate their job โ the answer seems obvious: quit. Their partner cheated on them โ leave. They have a dream but lack the courage to pursue it โ just start. Yet when the same kind of problem shows up in your own life, clarity disappears. What felt simple and obvious for someone else suddenly feels tangled, complicated, and impossible to resolve.
The Phenomenon: Solomon's Paradox
This gap between how clearly we judge others' problems versus our own has a name: Solomon's paradox. It describes a well-documented psychological pattern in which people reason more wisely about other people's lives than about their own.
The reason this happens comes down to emotional entanglement. When a problem is yours, it isn't just a neutral puzzle to solve โ it's wrapped up in:
- Your fear of what change might cost you
- Your personal history and the baggage attached to it
- Your ego, which resists admitting mistakes or facing hard truths
Because these forces are absent (or far weaker) when you look at someone else's situation, you can see their problem plainly. Your own problem, by contrast, gets distorted by everything you're personally invested in.
The Fix: Create Psychological Distance
Research into Solomon's paradox found a key insight: when people adopt a more distanced perspective on their own lives, they reason about those lives more wisely โ almost as if the problem belonged to someone else.
The practical takeaway is that wisdom isn't necessarily something you lack โ it's something that gets blocked by closeness. If you can engineer distance from your own situation, you can access the same clarity you naturally apply to other people's problems.
A Simple Writing Exercise to Try
One straightforward way to create this distance is through a short writing technique:
- Switch your pronoun. Instead of narrating your situation in the first person ("I"), write about yourself in the third person, using your name or "he/she/they."
- Describe the situation objectively. Explain what this person wants, what they are currently doing, and what is stopping them from getting there.
- Ask the friend question. Once it's written out, ask yourself: "If this person were my friend, what would I tell them to do?"
This small shift in framing โ from "I" to "they" โ is enough to trick your mind into dropping some of the emotional weight that normally clouds your judgment. By describing your own life as if it belonged to someone else, you strip away some of the fear, history, and ego that usually get in the way.
The Core Idea
The technique is simple, but its effect can be profound: stepping outside yourself, even briefly, can let you see your situation with the same clarity you'd offer a friend. The real insight isn't that you don't already know what to do โ it's that you need to step outside your own perspective long enough to see it, so that when you step back in, the right path forward is finally clear.