Seeing Other People Clearly Is Hard. Seeing Yourself Clearly Requires Solving a Different, Harder Problem Entirely.
Seeing another person clearly is genuinely difficult — bias, limited information, and the tendency to fill gaps with assumption all get in the way. But it's a solvable problem in principle: more information, more careful attention, and enough goodwill can meaningfully improve how clearly someone sees another person, because an outside vantage point on that person already exists, even if it's imperfectly used.
Seeing oneself clearly is a different and harder problem, not merely a more difficult version of the same one. The outside vantage point that makes clear-seeing possible for other people doesn't exist by default when the subject is oneself — there's no automatic outside position to occupy, only the same inside view that's also doing the looking.
This is why someone can be genuinely excellent at reading other people — accurate, empathetic, insightful — and remain comparatively poor at reading themselves. It's not a contradiction or a failure of the same skill. It's two different problems, one of which has a structural component the other is missing entirely.
Getting better at seeing other people is a matter of degree — more attention, less bias, more practice. Getting better at seeing oneself requires solving the missing-vantage-point problem first, which no amount of additional effort inside the same closed loop can substitute for.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai