"No Man Is a Prophet in His Own Land"

From my own experience: in a few fields I’ve spent years studying and practicing, I have knowledge I’ve actually tested. And yet, when I try to pass that knowledge on to people I’ve known for years — sometimes decades — I often don’t feel that they, or my information, are taken seriously.

That led me to what I’ve come to call the “law of the relative value of information,” which goes like this: the perceived value of information from a given person is inversely proportional to how well we know them.

In other words, the better we know someone, the less we value their advice — even when it’s squarely in their area of expertise. Have you run into this with yourself?

The paradox shows up because, as we get to know a person, we see not only their strengths but also their weaknesses, the small everyday vices that come with being human. And our brain sometimes “gets stuck” in the past: it holds on to the image of the person from the moment we met them years ago, ignoring how much they’ve grown — professionally and personally — since.

All of this quietly scrambles our judgment. And something interesting happens: a young guy on YouTube, holding forth with a clever face from his “fabulous” office in Dubai, reads as the peak of professionalism. Meanwhile some Vasily Petrovich we’ve known since our student years — a recognized world authority in that very field — doesn’t strike us as all that significant a specialist when we actually need advice. Even though, most likely, it’s his ideas that the YouTuber is paraphrasing and broadcasting.

Doctors describe this as “the doctor-in-the-family effect”: loved ones don’t take the professional advice of their own physician relatives seriously, preferring to trust outside specialists.

But here’s the question: what if this “law” is an illusion? What if, by thinking this way, we ourselves create a world around us where people behave accordingly?

As they say in Japan: “The word shapes reality.” And what reality would we want to see?

One where we soberly assess competence in the matter at hand by the objective markers of success — regardless of distance or interpersonal distortions. And if we have “access to the body” (or rather, to the mind) of such a person, that is priceless, and worth being grateful for.

Here’s to valuing the talented people right next to us! 😎