In his time, King Solomon was considered the personification of wisdom. People would travel great distances to seek his counsel. However, his own life did not reflect that wisdom. He had an uncontrolled passion for money and women. He made multiple bad decisions. And he neglected his duties as a father, which resulted in his son growing up to be an incompetent tyrant, ultimately bringing ruin upon the kingdom.
We all have this tendency to be smarter and wiser and more reasonable about other people’s problems than our own. Psychology refers to this as Solomon’s Paradox.
It’s so easy for us to give good advice on how to think and what to do to a friend who’s going through something difficult. But when it comes to our own problems, our wisdom suffers a big drop — we second-guess ourselves, we take things too seriously, we often make stupid decisions.
What’s the reason behind this asymmetry?
Our Native Egocentrism
You see, as humans, our default perspective is egocentric in nature — we are self-absorbed to a large extent and tend to view everything through the lens of how it relates to us. Similar to watching a gripping movie, our thoughts completely pull us in, amplifying the emotions. We get mesmerized by the mirage of our egocentrism. In the process, we lose sight of the big picture and objective reality.
Our egocentrism is the biggest reason behind all our interpersonal conflicts. We often fail to see things from the other person’s perspective (or they fail to see things from our perspective) — leading to misunderstandings and poor communication.
Egocentrism also puts a limit on our problem-solving abilities. When we’re too caught up in our thoughts and emotions, we project our biases, beliefs, and experiences onto the problem. We forget that our personal experiences make up an infinitesimal fraction of what’s happened in the world, but a major portion of how we think the world works. We get constrained by a first-person perspective.
The Nine Dot Problem
Take the Nine Dot Problem for example.
The challenge is to connect all the nine dots without lifting the pencil off the paper and without using more than four straight lines. Give it a try if you don’t know the solution. You have to think outside the box. But simply having the belief that we need to think outside the box does not help us solve the problem.
We need to “de-center” ourselves. So that we can disrupt the constraints in our thinking and bring in new perspectives.
In the Nine Dot problem, our mind unconsciously projects a frame (of a square) on the dots and then we operate within that frame. To break through, you have to break the square and not treat it as a typical connect the dot problem.
Gotta literally think outside the box here 😀
Breaking Frames
We are naturally disposed to “break frames”. Our mind wanders. The wandering distracts us from how we have framed a situation, creating the possibility for disruption. But there’s a big difference between letting your mind wander and overthinking in loops. Allowing your mind to wander is an act of non-doing. You have to relax and let go. There’s a reason why our best ideas come to us in the shower. Also why “Sleeping on it ” or “Taking a walk ” is so helpful.
But make no mistake, this is not something that happens just by chance. Creative problem solving is a skill that can be nurtured, trained, and optimized. And the best way to oil this cognitive machinery is through mindfulness.
Mindfulness helps you create space between you and your thoughts — allowing you to de-center and bring unconscious thinking patterns to the surface. This goes a long way in your ability to disrupt frames. Mindfulness also empowers you to come up with alternative and better frames. It does so by widening your field of awareness so that you can pick up on broader patterns you may not have considered before.
That’s why mindfulness is a meta-skill that improves every other skill.
(Mindfulness is just one of the many psychotechnologies that can enable de-centering and self-transcendence. Psychedelics, for instance, can do it in a radical way.)
Using Psychological Distance to Overcome Egocentrism
When it comes to personal problems, a simple way to de-center is to delineate your problem(s) from a third-person perspective. We are able to reason more smartly about other people’s problems because we have more distance from their problems than our own. Talking to yourself in the third person can create a similar effect and help you distance yourself from the problem at hand, allowing you to judge it more clearly.
So the next time you’re stuck or anxious, reflect on what you would tell someone else with a problem similar to yours. Better yet, write it down because it puts further distance between you and your thoughts. It then also motivates you to actually follow through with the advice.
A lot of the time, that’s what these posts are — it’s me giving advice to myself, hoping you may find it useful. Hope you do.
Thank you for reading. Most of the content on this website has emerged from conversations with readers like you. Every other Sunday, I send out an email dissecting some aspect of the human mind.
If you can take out a few minutes every once in a while, I’ll try to help you develop a deeper understanding of how our minds work. So that you can create a life full of beauty, joy, and love.
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