With the Motley Film & Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill.

If you're better at thinking critically about other people's situations than you are

thinking about your own, well you're not alone.

It's called Solomon's Paradox, and it's basically the ability to think more reasonably

about another person's problems than your own.

Olga Kazan is a writer for the Atlantic, and this is something she covered in her book

Weird, the power of being an outsider in an insider world.

As she tells it, there is a way to use Solomon's Paradox to your own advantage.

There's a lot of research that shows that thinking about your problems from a third person

perspective can help you make a better decision or just kind of see the light at the end of

the tunnel where you weren't able to before.

It could be as simple as, instead of saying, I need to decide what to do, say to yourself,

Olga needs to decide what she's going to do.

This can be really helpful in a number of experiences.

I write about it as applied to people who had a big crisis in their lives because they

were different and they felt this extreme alienation from other people around them.

You could also use this if you're deciding between two different jobs or two different

places to live or something else where you have to kind of give yourself advice.

The best way to think of it really is as you're giving yourself advice because people tend

to provide better advice when they think of themselves as a different person because it

just helps remove you from that immediate situation that you're too close to.

I'm Chris Hill.

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