Transcription
When I need advice, I'll be real with you. Like everybody here, you know, everybody who's listening to this, like being vulnerable, right? You know, with other people is tough, and and there's, I think there's some reasonable reasons why. One is, like, you don't want to be a burden to somebody else. Number two is, like, you don't want to be that person who always just, like, emotionally dumps on others. Like, that's not good.
And at the same time, like, if you're going through hard stuff, especially if it's related to other people, people don't forget the hard thing that you're dealing with with somebody else. And so you might end up getting out of that and forgiving the person or whatever, but the person you tell will always remember it. And sometimes it's difficult. So, like, let's say you have an issue with your your spouse. Who do you tell, right? Do you want to tell your homies? I don't know. That feels a little bit of a breach of of kind of like the the marital, you know, the marital covenant. You're not going to tell your employees, right? You don't want to tell your family because then they're going to start, they're going to see your your your your husband or your your wife differently. So who do you tell? Because you can tell a therapist, but maybe you don't want to do therapy because you don't like it. Who do you tell? Who do you get advice from?
And so I'll give you who I think about this. And, you know, unfortunately, the more status you accrue, the more valuable dirt on you is. If you're going through a hard time, the more people will want to gain that information to use it to their own advantage. And so, it actually makes it even lonelier.
I use Solomon frame as my way of getting the therapy that I think is helpful. The reason I call it Solomon is because there's a thing called the Solomon paradox, which is there's a human tendency to be better at offering wise advice to others than it is to apply that same wisdom to our own situation, our own lives. They call it the Solomon paradox because Solomon was this big wise guy, but he actually his life was a bit of a mess. It's almost like Merlin could see the future for everyone except for himself.
The way that I use this is I think I want to imagine talking to my 85-year-old incredibly wise self, or at least wiser than I am now, and I ask him what he thinks I should do. And what's weird is it takes you out of your current frame and puts you in this other frame, and you become more objective about your current situation.
I actually had a a conversation with a business owner who was out here in Vegas at one of our advisory practice events, and she said, "I've got all these businesses, not really sure what I should do, blah blah blah." And she happened to have like a business academy as one of her businesses. And I said, "Let me reverse the tables on you." I said, "Let me pretend to be a business owner and I'm gonna say back to you everything you just said. What do you think you should do?" She was like, "Well, yeah. I mean, it's obvious when you think about it like that." And I'm like, "Right, it's obvious." It's only difficult for us because our judgment is clouded by our emotions because we have emotional context. We have emotional ties to the people or the situations or the investments. You can be like more logical decision-making.
By pulling out and thinking about your 85-year-old self, you are able to be less emotional about the current situation without sacrificing any kind of confidentiality because it's still you talking to you. You don't have to waste any time giving context, or, and let's be real, if you know how to persuade people, you can jade your data that you give to somebody else so that they give you the answer that you want rather than giving them the whole picture which you might be embarrassed to share.
In my opinion, this framework of having these conversations. And to be fair, I don't do it all the time. I do it when I need it. If I'm like, man, I gotta work through this, I just have this little chat that I open up and I just start writing through like a a DM to me in the future. And I literally just, you know, enter space. Enter space. Um, that includes me mocking my younger self, uh, which I do frequently, or at least my 85-year-old self does. In my opinion, it has been more helpful than therapy because you have all the context. This has helped me make significantly better choices when I feel like I have emotionality that could be affecting.