The Crocodile's Deal

Around two thousand years ago somebody in Greece came up with a puzzle that still hasn't been solved.

A crocodile snatches a child off a riverbank. The parent begs for him back, and the crocodile makes an offer:

Predict what I'm going to do next. Get it right and you can have your child.

The parent thinks about it and says, "You are not going to return my child."

Now the crocodile has a problem:

• Keep the child and the parent guessed correctly, which means the child goes back.

• Return the child and the parent guessed wrong, which means the crocodile keeps him.

Whatever it does, it breaks the deal it just made.

Philosophers call this the crocodile paradox, usually attributed to Chrysippus. It has stuck around this long because the shape of it keeps showing up in ordinary life.

You've probably been in one.

The performance review where honesty gets you labeled difficult and diplomacy gets you labeled checked out.

The negotiation where standing firm makes you rigid and any movement makes you soft.

The conversation at home where yes spoils them and no makes you the bad guy.

Look closely at any of those and the decision was never really where the problem lived. Somebody handed you terms with one outcome already built in, then asked you to choose.

Most of us respond by working harder inside the frame.

We run the options again, make a list, ask a couple of friends what they'd do.

Every road ends in the same place, because somebody drew the map that way on purpose.

The parent in the story gets out by turning the crocodile's own rules back on it. That's the whole move.

When I was trying to play Division I football, I got handed my own version of the deal.

I'm legally blind. Nobody said the rule out loud, but everyone in the building understood it. You have to see to play. And you can't show anyone you can play until you're on the field, which was never going to happen until you'd already shown them.

I spent a while arguing with that. Meetings, explanations, none of it moved.

So I went looking for a job on that team where the terms were written differently.

Long snapper. You send the ball between your legs, backwards, to a spot you've rehearsed ten thousand times. Feel and repetition do most of the work.

That's how I ended up on the field in a Division I game.

The crocodile has a relative worth knowing about.

The liar paradox is one sentence long: "This sentence is false." True makes it false, false makes it true, and the machinery locks up.

That one lives in your head more than on your calendar.

You decide you're not someone who speaks up in rooms like that, so you sit quiet, and the quiet becomes your evidence.

The belief keeps producing its own proof. Nothing outside you has to hold it up.

Both puzzles come apart the same way, once you stop answering on the terms you were given.

So this week, when you hit a decision where every option feels like a loss, put the options down for a minute.

Ask who wrote the terms and whether you ever actually agreed to them. Most of the time you didn't.

Hit reply and tell me what rigged frame you're sitting in right now. I read all of them.

And if you're planning an event this year and you want your people thinking this way, let's talk.

Aaron