“If a riverbed remains unchanged, the water will continue to flow along the path it always has, since that is the most natural route for it to take. If the underlying structures of your life remain unchanged, the greatest tendency is for you to follow the same direction your life has always taken.” —Robert Fritz.

“One of the most important results you can brings into the world is the you that you really want to be”

you disconnect yourself from what you truly want.

And all that is left is compromise."

What if trying to solve a problem is the reason you failed to solve it? You have a problem, so you take an action to lessen it, and you end up with less of a problem. As a result you’ll be less motivated to keep addressing it. But the original problem remains.

Robert Fritz, in his book The Path Of Least Resistance (1984), uses the example of the famine in Ethiopia in the early 1980s. The famine triggered a worldwide response, until eventually “the situation got better. The media lost interest. Fewer pictures of starving children made it to primetime newscasts. Contributions slowed” – even though the problem was far from solved decisively.

While it’s tasteless to draw an analogy between humanitarian tragedy and, say, your marital troubles or your unfulfilling job. But there is one. The underlying issue is that you have two contradictory goals: you want a happy relationship or meaningful work, but you don’t want to face the discomfort of transforming or leaving your current relationship or job. So you act in service to the first goal (pursuing an improvement) until it starts to conflict with the second goal (avoiding uncomfortable change), whereupon you reverse tactics. It’s like being stood in the middle of a room with huge rubber bands around your waist attached to opposite walls. Move towards one wall, to release the tension on one band, and you are pulled back by the other.

What is the answer? The trick is to stop focusing on problems. Ask instead, what do you want to create? When you focus on solving a problem, you can’t help but inherit the assumptions baked into it – including a very narrow range of successful outcomes, all of which amount to, “I want this problem to go away”. Forget all that, and decide what it is that you want, take stock of reality, then take the necessary actions to invent the outcome you seek.

What emerges in its place might not work, but at least you won’t be at risk of improving things just enough so that they don’t get any better.