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When You’re Stuck In The Cave
At some point — in life, business, or both — you will hit a wall.
A launch flops. A key hire bails. You can’t figure out why growth stalled, how to fix your positioning, or whether to kill an initiative you poured your soul into. Or maybe, your personal life feels like it’s falling apart.
Worse, these challenges rarely arrive one at a time. They stack, compound, and crowd out your mind until you’re left staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m., wondering if you’re just missing something obvious… or if you’re f*cked, and there’s no solution.
When that moment hits — and it will — the first thing you need isn’t another podcast or productivity hack.
You need a new perspective.
To borrow from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: when you’re stuck, it’s often because you’ve spent too long watching shadows on the wall, believing they’re the whole picture. The shapes are familiar. The meanings are fixed. But the real breakthrough only happens when you turn around, leave the cave, and see the same world from a radically different angle.
This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on how to break through moments of stuckness — the kinds where you don’t just lack a plan… you don’t even know where to start.
- Part 1 (today) is about shifting your perspective — the lens through which you view the problem.
- Part 2 will focus on how to take small, momentum-building actions when you’re frozen.
- Part 3 will explore how to manage stress and anxiety when the pressure mounts.
Today, we’re starting with perspective because it’s the root system of every decision you’ll make.
If you’re thinking in loops, trying harder won’t save you. You need to shift diagonally — not forward, but sideways and up — to create space for a new kind of solution to emerge.
That’s where these five unconventional techniques come in.
Some are backed by cognitive science. Others are borrowed from ancient philosophy, military training, or elite performers in high-stakes arenas. All of them will help you break out of the cave and see your current stuckness from a new vantage point.
Let’s dive in.
1. “Solomon’s Paradox”
Ever notice how crystal clear your thinking becomes when a friend asks for advice?
The solutions that elude us when solving our own problems somehow materialize instantly when helping others. This asymmetry isn't just anecdotal – it's backed by cognitive science.
Researchers Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross found that people make more rational, balanced decisions when they step outside their first-person perspective. This "Solomon's Paradox" (named after the biblical king known for advising others wisely while making questionable personal choices) reveals how emotional entanglement clouds our judgment about our own situations.
How to apply it: Transform your self-talk into third-person consultation:
- Write your problem as if a close friend presented it to you, using their name
- Physically change environments (even moving to a different chair helps)
- Draft a detailed email of advice you'd give this friend
- Specifically use phrases like "I would advise you to..." and "What you might not be seeing is..."
The key insight: Your wisdom is already there – it's your emotional proximity that blocks access to it.
2. Memento Mori Journaling
"Remember that you will die" doesn't sound like uplifting advice. But this ancient Stoic practice — Memento Mori — offers one of the most powerful perspective resets available.
Unlike typical journaling focused on processing daily events, Memento Mori journaling deliberately contemplates your mortality as a clarifying force.
A 2017 study in Psychological Science found that people who engaged with their mortality in a philosophical (rather than fearful) way demonstrated improved prioritization and reduced attachment to trivial concerns.
How to apply it: Spend 10 minutes with each of these questions:
- If I had only 5 years left, would I still pursue my current goals?
- What would I regret not saying to someone important to me?
- What daily activities would I eliminate if I valued my time as truly finite?
- What legacy-defining work would I prioritize starting tomorrow?
The goal isn't morbid thinking but radical clarity.
Marcus Aurelius wrote: "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think."
The key insight: Mortality doesn't diminish life's value – it's precisely what gives it meaning and helps separate what truly matters from what merely feels urgent.
3. Constraint-Based Thinking
When faced with seemingly impossible challenges, our instinct is often to wish for more resources (more time, more money, more people etc).
But history repeatedly shows that the most extraordinary innovations emerge from severe constraints, not abundance.
Some of humanity's greatest achievements have come from embracing constraints so extreme they seemed unreasonable or impossible.
When President Kennedy declared in 1961 that America would put a man on the moon "before this decade is out," NASA faced nearly impossible constraints of time, technology, and knowledge.
These constraints didn't limit innovation – they catalyzed it, forcing the development of integrated circuits, new materials, and computing advances that might have taken decades under normal circumstances.
How to apply it:
- Choose an artificial constraint (budget, time, resources, words)
- Make it radically restrictive – the "$100 budget test" for a marketing plan, the "explain it to an 8-year-old" test for complex ideas
- Work within this constraint to find solutions you wouldn't otherwise consider
The key insight: Radical constraints are one of the most effective ways to FORCE new perspective. When you’re trying to find a solution for 10% improvement, it’s too easy to keep everything the way it has been. But if you are forced to find a 500% or 1,000% improvement, you have to completely rethink your approach.
4. Déformation Professionnelle Reversal
"Déformation professionnelle" is a French term describing how your professional training unconsciously biases how you view problems. Lawyers see legal issues everywhere. Engineers spot inefficiencies. Marketers notice positioning failures.
These professional lenses are valuable but limiting.
What if you deliberately adopted a completely opposite professional lens?
How to apply it:
- Identify your dominant professional perspective (analytical, creative, strategic, etc.)
- Select its polar opposite (if you're analytical, choose artistic; if you're a pragmatic operator, choose philosophical)
- Create a persona with that opposite perspective, complete with name and background
- Analyze your current challenge through their eyes, writing in their voice
A particularly effective version pairs this with physical environment change — literally sitting in a different space while adopting this counter-perspective.
The key insight: Sometimes, your greatest blind spots aren't in what you don't know, but in what your expertise prevents you from seeing – an opposing perspective often holds the missing piece.
5. Subtractive Solution Paradox
In a study at the University of Virginia, researchers discovered a powerful cognitive bias: when faced with problems, people overwhelmingly default to thinking about what they can add, and miss what they could subtract or remove — even when subtraction would be more effective.
This "subtractive solution paradox" affects everything from product design to personal productivity. We instinctively ask "what's missing?" instead of "what can I remove?"
How to apply it:
- For any challenge you're facing, force yourself to consider five purely subtractive solutions
- Ask: "If I could only remove elements (never add), how would I solve this?"
- Evaluate what remains after subtraction against your original goals
The key insight: The most valuable addition to your thinking might actually be subtraction – removing elements often shows us truths that were there all along.
The Takeaway: Diagonal Thinking
When you’re stuck, trying to brute-force a solution with the same mindset that created the problem usually makes it worse.
These techniques help you shift diagonally — not inching forward or backward, but to an entirely different playing field.
Don’t just look harder. Look differently.
Your best solutions are often just outside your current field of view — you just need to step outside the cave.
See you next week for Part 2: How to Take Action — with real-world systems for building momentum, even when you feel frozen.
Until next week!
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