The Advice You Give Other People Is the Advice You Need to Hear
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You already know what to do. You’ve been telling other people to do it for years.
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A friend called me last year in a panic about his business. Revenue was flat. He’d been doing the same things for two years expecting different results. Spending all his time on operations instead of growth. Avoiding the uncomfortable work of selling because fulfillment felt safer.
I told him exactly what to do. Without hesitation. Like it was obvious. Because from where I was sitting, it was obvious.
“You’re hiding in operations because selling makes you uncomfortable. You already know what moves the needle. You’re just avoiding it because it’s scary. Stop optimizing what’s easy and go do the thing that’s hard.”
He thanked me. Said it was exactly what he needed to hear. Said I was great at cutting through the noise.
I hung up the phone feeling useful. Smart. Like a good friend.
Then I sat at my desk and spent the next three hours reorganizing my content calendar instead of reaching out to potential sponsors. Which is exactly the thing I’d just told him to stop doing. Hiding in operations. Avoiding the uncomfortable work. Doing what felt productive instead of what actually mattered.
I’d given perfect advice. Clear. Specific. Actionable. And I was doing the exact opposite of it in my own life. Not because I didn’t know better. Because I did know better. I’d just proven it by telling someone else.
That moment has haunted me. Not because it was unusual. Because I realized I do it constantly. And so does everyone I know.
Your Advice Is Your Autobiography
Pay attention to the advice you give most passionately. The thing you find yourself saying to friends over and over. The counsel that comes out of you without thinking. The wisdom you deliver with such certainty that the other person walks away convinced you have life figured out.
That advice isn’t random. It’s not coming from some objective place of wisdom. It’s coming from the exact place where you’re stuck.
When you tell a friend “just leave the job if it’s making you miserable,” you’re not just giving career advice. You’re narrating your own situation. You’re describing what you know you should do but haven’t done.
When you tell someone “stop overthinking and just start,” you’re describing your own pattern. The thing you’ve been overthinking. The project you haven’t started. The decision you’ve been circling for months.
When you say “you deserve better than that” about someone’s relationship, listen to yourself. Where in your life are you accepting less than you deserve? Where are you tolerating something you’d never let a friend tolerate?
Your advice is autobiographical. The things you see most clearly in other people’s lives are the things you’re living in your own. You just can’t see them because you’re inside them.
I noticed this pattern on the podcast too. Over 800 interviews, I’ve asked people for advice hundreds of times. The advice they give most confidently almost always maps to the challenge they’re currently facing. The founder talking passionately about “being patient with the process” is almost always in a season where patience is being tested. The executive advising “have the hard conversation early” has almost always just avoided one themselves.
We don’t give advice from a place of mastery. We give it from a place of struggle. The advice is a message to ourselves that we route through someone else because it’s easier to deliver it to them than to receive it ourselves.
Why You Can See Their Problem and Not Yours
There’s a reason you’re brilliant at diagnosing other people’s situations and useless at diagnosing your own. It’s not hypocrisy. It’s geometry.
When you look at a friend’s problem, you have distance. You can see the whole board. Their emotions aren’t your emotions. Their fear isn’t your fear. Their excuses sound like exactly what they are: excuses. You can see the pattern clearly because you’re not inside the pattern.
When you look at your own problem, you have no distance. You’re standing in the middle of it. Your emotions are real. Your fear is justified. Your excuses don’t sound like excuses. They sound like reasons. Good ones. Practical ones. The kind of reasons a reasonable person would have.
Your friend says “I can’t leave my job because of the financial risk” and you think: “That’s fear talking.” You say to yourself “I can’t leave my job because of the financial risk” and you think: “That’s reality.”
Same sentence. Same situation. Completely different interpretation. Because distance changes everything.
Solomon’s Paradox
This pattern is old enough to have a name. Researchers call it Solomon’s Paradox, after King Solomon, who might be the most famous example of someone who couldn’t follow his own advice.
Solomon was legendary for his wisdom. Kings traveled from distant lands to seek his counsel. His judgments were so renowned they became part of the Bible. When two women claimed the same baby, Solomon proposed cutting the child in half, knowing the real mother would rather give up her claim than watch her child die. Brilliant. The kind of clarity that made him the most sought-after advisor in the ancient world.
He also made catastrophic decisions in his own life. Hundreds of political marriages that destabilized his kingdom. Alliances that contradicted his own principles. Choices that, if a friend had described them to him, he would have diagnosed in seconds. The wisest advisor in history was a disaster at advising himself.
Igor Grossmann, a researcher at the University of Waterloo, studied this and found something remarkable. When people were asked to reason about someone else’s problems, they considered multiple perspectives. They acknowledged uncertainty. They found creative solutions. They were wise.
When those same people faced identical problems in their own lives, the wisdom vanished. They became narrow. Emotional. Rigid. They defaulted to fear-based thinking. They couldn’t see options that, minutes earlier, they’d identified effortlessly for someone else.
Same brain. Same intelligence. Same life experience. Completely different quality of thinking depending on one variable: whether the problem was theirs or someone else’s.
Solomon couldn’t follow his own advice. Neither can you. Not because you’re foolish. Because wisdom requires distance, and you have zero distance from your own life.
The Cost Gap
Knowing and doing have completely different price tags. That’s the other reason you don’t follow your own advice.
Giving advice is free. It costs you nothing to tell a friend to leave the bad job. You don’t have to update your resume. You don’t have to face the financial uncertainty. You don’t have to tell your family. You don’t have to walk into your boss’s office. You get all the clarity of the right answer without any of the cost of executing it.
Following advice is expensive. Every piece of advice you’ve ever given someone required them to do something uncomfortable. Leave the job. Have the conversation. End the relationship. Start the thing. Stop the thing. Raise the price. Lower the ego.
The advice was free to give. The action is expensive to take.
This is the gap that keeps you stuck. You know what to do. You’ve proven you know what to do by telling other people. But the cost of doing it in your own life feels different. Higher. More real. Because it is more real. It’s your life. Your money. Your relationships. Your identity.
When I told my friend to stop hiding in operations and go sell, it cost me nothing. When I try to tell myself the same thing, it costs me the comfort of doing easy work. It costs me the possibility of rejection. It costs me the safety of hiding behind a content calendar instead of making uncomfortable asks.
The advice is identical. The cost of following it is entirely different depending on whether it’s directed at someone else or at yourself.
The Mirror You Won’t Look Into
I’ve started doing something that I find deeply uncomfortable but incredibly useful. After I give someone advice, especially the kind that comes out fast and certain, I write it down. Not for them. For me.
Then I ask myself: Where am I not following this?
The results have been embarrassing. Not once or twice. Every single time.
I told a founder on the show to stop trying to make his product perfect before launching. I’ve been sitting on two projects for months because they’re not “ready.”
I told a friend to have a direct conversation with her business partner instead of hinting at the problem. I’ve been hinting at a problem with someone on my team for weeks instead of addressing it directly.
I told Gina’s brother to stop waiting until he had enough saved to start investing and just start with whatever he had. I delayed starting a new investment strategy for three months because I was “waiting for the right time.”
Every time. Without exception. The advice I gave with total confidence was the advice I was ignoring with total consistency.
This isn’t hypocrisy. Hypocrisy would be knowing the advice is right and choosing not to follow it. This is something stranger. It’s knowing the advice is right and genuinely not seeing that it applies to you. The emotional distance that makes other people’s problems visible is the same emotional closeness that makes your own invisible.
You’re not a hypocrite. You’re just too close to see.
The Advice Inventory
Here’s an exercise that will change how you think about yourself. It takes ten minutes and it will be uncomfortable.
Write down the five pieces of advice you give most often. Not advice you’ve read in books. The things you actually say to people in your life. The counsel that comes out of your mouth so naturally it feels like reflex.
Maybe it’s “stop overthinking and just start.” Maybe it’s “you need to set better boundaries.” Maybe it’s “stop saying yes to things you don’t want to do.” Maybe it’s “invest in yourself before you invest in anything else.” Maybe it’s “the right time is now, not later.”
Whatever your five are, write them down.
Now read them back to yourself. Not as advice for someone else. As a message from you, to you.
Every single one of those sentences is about your life. Every one is a pattern you’ve identified, a solution you’ve prescribed, and a change you haven’t made.
You’ve been telling everyone around you exactly what you need to hear. And you’ve been doing it for years.
The Third Person Test
Once you see the pattern, the question becomes how to break it. Grossmann’s research revealed something that I now use constantly. When people described their own problems in the third person, their reasoning improved dramatically.
Instead of “What should I do about this situation?” they’d say: “Scott has been avoiding this conversation for three months. He knows the relationship with this vendor isn’t working. He keeps telling himself he’ll deal with it next month. What would you tell Scott to do?”
Same problem. Same facts. Different pronoun. Completely different quality of thinking.
Something about the distance created by the third person unlocks the same clarity you have when advising a friend. Your brain stops treating it as a threat to your identity and starts treating it as a puzzle to solve. The fear drops. The options multiply. The answer becomes obvious.
I use this now whenever I’m stuck. I describe my situation as if a friend just called me about it. I use specific details. I make it real. Then I give that friend advice.
The advice is always clear. Always confident. Always exactly what I need to hear. Because it’s the same brain giving the advice. It’s just not blocked by the emotional closeness of it being my problem.
Try it with whatever you’re stuck on right now. Describe it in the third person. “My friend has been at this job for two years. She knows it’s not going anywhere. She keeps staying because the salary is comfortable and leaving feels risky. What would you tell her?”
Whatever just came to mind is the answer. You already knew it. You just needed the distance to see it.
Why This Matters
The reason this matters isn’t that you’re a fraud. You’re not. The advice you give is genuinely helpful. People benefit from it. Your clarity about their situations is real.
The reason it matters is that you’ve been sitting on the solution to your own problems for years and routing it to everyone except yourself.
Think about what that means. You don’t need more information. You don’t need another book. You don’t need someone to tell you what you already know. You already have the answer. You’ve had it for years. You’ve been handing it to other people and watching them transform while you stay exactly where you are.
The information isn’t the bottleneck. The application is.
And the application feels harder for your own life because you don’t have the luxury of emotional distance. You’re inside the problem. The fear is real. The cost is real. The risk is real. All the things that are easy to dismiss when it’s someone else’s situation become immovable when it’s yours.
But they’re not immovable. They just feel immovable because you’re standing too close to them. Solomon’s Paradox isn’t a life sentence. It’s a bias. And biases can be corrected once you know they’re there.
The One Piece of Advice
If I could only follow one piece of my own advice, it would be the one I give most often. The one that comes out of me without thinking. The one I’ve said to so many people I’ve lost count.
“Stop doing what’s comfortable and start doing what matters. You already know the difference. You’re just choosing the easy one.”
I say this to people with absolute conviction. Like it’s simple. Like the difference between comfortable and important is obvious and the choice should be obvious too.
And it is obvious. When it’s someone else.
When it’s me, I’m still reorganizing the content calendar.
But less than I used to. Because now I hear myself. When I’m about to give someone advice, a small part of my brain asks: “Are you doing this yourself?” And the answer is usually uncomfortable. And the discomfort is usually productive. Because it closes the gap, just a little, between what I know and what I do.
That’s all this is. Not a massive overhaul. Not a complete transformation. Just the simple practice of listening to your own advice with the same seriousness you expect from the people you give it to.
What You’ve Been Telling Everyone
You already know what you need to do. You’ve known for a while.
Not because you’re wise. Because you’ve been saying it out loud to every person who asks for your help. You’ve been diagnosing the pattern, prescribing the fix, and delivering it with total confidence.
To everyone except yourself.
The next time you hear yourself giving advice, pause. Write it down. Then ask the question you’ve been avoiding:
Am I doing this?
The answer will tell you everything you need to know about where you’re stuck and exactly how to get unstuck. Because you already have the answer. You’ve had it all along.
You just kept giving it away.
Thank you for reading,
Scott
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