I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

Your favorite tool blinds you

We all do this without realizing it. You learn Excel at work, suddenly every problem looks like a spreadsheet. You get into running, and suddenly you think everyone needs to get into running. A friend starts therapy and recommends it for everything. It's not that these tools are bad—they genuinely help with certain things. It's just that once something works for us, we start seeing it everywhere.

The real trap isn't having a favorite tool. It's forgetting that you have other tools in the drawer. Someone who only knows how to give advice will turn every conversation into a problem to solve. Someone whose main coping mechanism is working late will try to outwork their relationship problems. We get comfortable with what we know, and comfort is seductive.

What makes this worth paying attention to is how invisible it becomes. You're not consciously deciding "this is my hammer." You're just reaching for what's familiar because it's there, it's proven itself, and it works—at least sometimes. The people who seem most effective at actually solving problems tend to be the ones who notice when they're reaching for the same tool again and ask themselves: is this really the right one, or am I just comfortable with it?