I spend a solid chunk of my year in rooms full of strangers. Real estate investors in one city, entrepreneurs in the next, and business owners in yet another.
And you know what? The questions people ask after I speak are almost never new.
That’s not a knock on my audience, by the way. They’re good questions. I just find it interesting—compelling, even—that the same questions keep cropping up regardless of industry or circumstance.
I’ve also noticed that I can come up with answers to their problems much more readily than I can for my own.
That might sound like cruel irony, but it’s a documented psychological phenomenon. And I think understanding it might be one of the keys to solving some of my most confounding problems.
Unpacking Solomon’s Paradox
Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross ran a series of studies in 2014 that demonstrated what they called Solomon’s Paradox. In short, they found that people consistently reason more wisely about other people’s dilemmas than their own, even when the situations are nearly identical.
Better judgment, as it turns out, comes from distance and not greater intelligence.
It happens even when the people involved have the exact same information. So no one has a more complete picture; we’re just processing the problem and its factors differently depending on whether it’s happening to us or to someone else.
Now, I've probably picked up a few things about giving useful answers to strangers over years of pattern recognition. More than that, though, I think it’s easier to give insightful answers when I don’t have an emotional stake in the situation.
Sometimes it helps to have the privilege of objectivity, of not being personally impacted one way or the other.
Borrowing Distance for Decision-Making
Three practices have helped me manufacture objectivity for my own decisions.
Ask what you’d tell a friend with this same problem. Instead of asking myself, I put my problem on a hypothetical friend. What would I tell them if they asked for my advice? Taking the issue off myself not only improves my clarity, but also helps me reach conclusions much faster. Thinking of it as a friend’s problem, though, doesn’t totally remove my emotional stake—I care about this friend on a personal level, and there will be follow-up if they take my advice.
Imagine the question coming from the audience. If a stranger stood up after one of my talks and described my own situation back to me, what would I say to them? This is where I can strip back the emotional stakes and the instinct to protect my own ego.
Focus on the structure, not the surface details. Earlier, I said that I consistently heard the same problems across all kinds of roles and industries. Sometimes leaders can get bogged down in the technical details and miss the core problem. A property manager afraid to raise rent on a model resident faces the same problem as an employer delivering harsh feedback to an employee who clearly deserves a raise: avoiding a necessary but uncomfortable conversation.
Because of this, I try to name the pattern beneath the problem rather than the specifics of the situation.
When Creating Distance Doesn’t Work
Now, these tactics don’t work all the time or in every situation.
It doesn’t work if information is missing. Manufacturing distance only helps when your judgment is clouded due to ego or fear. It doesn’t help when you’re missing out on key facts.
It can turn into a stalling tactic. Some people use the outside view to keep circling and philosophizing about a decision instead of making the call. Distance is a tool for clarity, but you still have to decide.
The Practice I’d Leave You With
Having a hundred strangers hand me their hardest decisions every year is a huge responsibility, but it’s also a big advantage. Not everyone gets that room full of strangers.
Before your next big decision, I’d encourage you to say the problem out loud exactly the way you’d pitch it to an audience of strangers.
They’ve never met you; they don’t know your business; they don’t know your history. They have no loyalty to you or stakes in your outcomes.
What’s left will be the real decision.
If you’re someone people regularly come to with their problems, what's the piece of advice you find yourself giving over and over again? Tell me about it in the comments.