Your knowledge of the problem is exactly why you can’t solve it for yourself 🥴

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]I can solve almost any problem that anyone brings me, but I will not be solving mine anytime soon. You know exactly what your friend should do, and you can map the steps, you can see every single outcome very clearly, and you can hand over a comprehensive solution with zero hesitation. But then you go home with your own version of the problem, and you sit there, and you ponder over it, and you can't do [ __ ] anything about it. I've started to realize it's obviously not because I don't know what to do. It's because I know too much about what doing it might cost. When it's someone else's problem, you can't project every way it might go wrong for them. You can just see the next logical step, and you think, "Well, do that." But when it's your own problem, you have the full package.

[00:00:46]Every variable, every potential failure point, every solution, every problem with that solution, all running at once.

[00:00:54]And you know exactly what each option is going to cost your brain when it's already running at the capacity that it runs at. The paralysis isn't really from me not knowing what to do. I absolutely know what to do, but I know too much about what I should do, and what that will demand from me. That's the bad bit.

[00:01:15]That same depth of knowledge makes you fantastic at problem-solving, but paradoxically, and quite ironically, it kind of renders you unable to move.

[00:01:27]You're not attached to the potential bad outcomes when you're giving someone else advice. The solution I just sometimes suggest is putting yourself outside of the problem, taking it away from your identity, and telling yourself that you're solving someone else's problem.

[00:01:41]But the issue is there when you're so painfully aware that wasn't meant to rhyme, of the fact that that is not someone else's problem. You cannot like put that barrier up and separate the two. But when you're doing that, do you notice what you just did? You rejected a solution before you tried it, before it ever had a chance in reality. Your brain is so good at predicting failure that it will dismantle a solution before it's even tried it. So, [ __ ] finding the perfect solution. The trick is you need to catch yourself rejecting one before it's even been tested out, and then trying it anyway.