The Tyranny of What Works (or, How Success Starts Writing the Rules for You)

I was standing in the produce section of a Trader Joe’s on a Tuesday evening, still wearing my work clothes, holding a bell pepper and experiencing what I can only describe as a minor cognitive meltdown. Not about traffic or deadlines or any of the usual weeknight anxiety triggers. About whether I actually liked bell peppers.

This is what happens when you stop on the way home to grab ingredients for dinner: you have time to think. Too much time. The kind of time where a simple vegetable purchase becomes a referendum on your entire decision-making apparatus.

Because here’s the thing¹ I realized while standing there under the fluorescent lights: I couldn’t remember the last time I’d wanted bell peppers. I could remember dozens of times I’d bought them. I'd chopped, cooked, eaten them. But desiring them? That memory didn’t exist.

What I did remember was the first time my standard stir-fry recipe² worked. The relief of having a reliable answer to the weeknight-dinner problem. My brain filed that success under “default meal” and had been autofilling ever since. This was the seventh time in two weeks I’d reached for the same ingredients. Not because I craved them. Because my hand knew where to go.

The woman next to me was methodically selecting individual grapes from different bunches, creating what she clearly believed to be the Platonic ideal of a grape cluster. She seemed happy and engaged, present in her choosing. I was holding a vegetable I wasn’t sure I even enjoyed, wondering how many other areas of my life had narrowed into a single, repeated gesture performed on autopilot.

When did convenience calcify into something else entirely?

Here’s what nobody tells you about becoming competent at something: competence is a trapdoor disguised as a foundation. You get good at a thing, the thing works, and then suddenly the thing becomes the thing. Your brain, ever the efficiency expert, starts filing every new problem under the same solution category. It’s not laziness. It’s optimization gone rogue.

Psychologists call this functional fixedness,³ though the term makes it sound more like a medical condition than the everyday rut it really is. Abraham Maslow (yes, the hierarchy-of-needs guy) put it more plainly: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

But Maslow was being generous with tempting. It’s not temptation. It’s gravitational pull. Your best solution becomes your only solution not because you’re lazy or uncreative but because your brain is doing exactly what evolution designed it to do. Conserve energy by automating successful patterns.⁴

The problem isn’t the hammer. The problem is forgetting you have hands.

Think about the last time you gave advice to a friend. What did you suggest? Now think about the time before. And the time before that. If you’re being honest (and why wouldn’t you be, alone with this paragraph), you probably notice a pattern. We all have our Greatest Hits album of advice and we play the same tracks no matter the situation.

I have a colleague whose answer to every setback is “Let’s make a spreadsheet.” Every. Single. Time. Budget issue? Spreadsheet. Team tension? Spreadsheet. Vending machine ate his dollar? You can guess.⁵ To be fair, spreadsheets solve maybe sixty percent of his problems, which means they fail on the other forty. But that success rate installed itself as his neural default.

He’s not wrong to rely on spreadsheets. They’re genuinely useful. Just as my stir-fry is genuinely a good dinner option. Just as your default response to conflict (withdrawal, confrontation, humor, over-agreeing) has probably served you well.

The question isn’t whether your hammer works. The question is: Do you realize you’re holding one?

French military strategists spent seven years and an obscene amount of money building the Maginot Line in the 1930s (a series of fortifications designed to prevent another invasion). The logic was impeccable: the previous war had been won in the trenches through static defense, ergo the next war would require even better static defenses. Underground barracks, railways, retractable gun turrets. A marvel of engineering.⁶

Then Germany invaded through Belgium and the whole thing became a very expensive museum of irrelevance.

This is what happens when preparation becomes assumption. The French weren’t stupid. They were trapped by competence. The tools that won the last war became the only tools they could imagine for the next.

You’re probably doing this right now in at least three areas of your life. I know I am. I was doing it with a bell pepper.

There’s a cognitive bias⁷ called the availability heuristic, academic shorthand for “your brain decides based on whatever examples come to mind fastest.” The tools that work well become extremely available in your mental filing system. They’re the first thing your brain serves up when a new problem arrives.

Got a conflict? Your brain instantly recalls the last ten conflicts and what you did. Whatever worked before becomes the template. Your brain isn’t limiting you. It’s helping, offering the most reliable solution from historical data.

The trouble is, your brain can’t tell the difference between this worked before and this will work now. It just assumes pattern replication equals success replication.⁸

That would be fine if problems came in standard formats. But they don’t. Your conflict with your boss isn’t your conflict with your partner, even though both involve disagreement. The variables, context, and desired outcomes are different. Yet your loyal brain serves up the same pattern because it’s matching on surface similarity.

Your competence is making you less adaptable.

I want to tell you about my friend Sarah,⁹ who spent five years climbing the consulting-firm ladder as the person who fixed broken processes. She was brilliant at it. But then she joined a startup where the problem wasn’t broken process. It was no process. Her whole professional identity was built on optimization. But you can’t optimize what doesn’t exist.

It took her eight months to realize she was trying to fix things that needed to be created. Eight months of reaching for her reliable hammer and finding no nails. Her hammer wasn’t wrong. The problem was different.

How many of your struggles are actually tool-problem mismatches you’re interpreting as personal failures?

There’s a concept in systems thinking¹⁰ called success to the successful. Things that work get reinforced, attract more resources, and become the default strategy for everything. It’s why dominant companies stagnate. Why bestselling authors keep rewriting the same book.¹¹ Why you keep dating the same type of person despite swearing it’ll be different.

Success creates momentum; momentum creates trajectory; trajectory creates inevitability. Before you know it, you’re not choosing your tools anymore. Your tools are choosing your problems.

Or worse: your tools are choosing which problems you’re even willing to see.¹²

Here’s where I’m supposed to give you five steps to break your patterns. But that would be me using my own hammer (analytical frameworks) to solve your pattern-trap problem. So instead, sit with something uncomfortable: the possibility that your strengths are creating your blind spots.

Not because you’re wrong. Not because you should abandon what works. But because excellence in one domain can cast shadows everywhere else.¹³ You become so good at one way of solving problems you stop seeing the ones it can’t.

The stir-fry isn’t the issue. The issue is whether I’m making it because I want stir-fry or because my brain auto-completed “dinner” with “stir-fry.”

Which of your solutions have become reflexes? And are those reflexes serving you? Or just serving themselves?

Back in produce, I finally did what I should’ve done twenty-five minutes earlier: picked up a bell pepper and smelled it. Nothing. No appetite, no spark of wanting. So I put it back.

Then I picked up ingredients I’d never combined before.¹⁴ A small, rebellious act of uncertainty.

The woman still curating her perfect grape bunch when I arrived was still there, still choosing, still present. I used to think people like her were overthinking. Now I understand she was practicing something I’d forgotten: the difference between solving problems and actually living.

The automatic doors opened. Cool evening air. Parking lot. I loaded my groceries and sat there, hand on the key, ready to execute the same right-turn route home I’d taken three hundred times.

Seven minutes. Never more than eight.

I turned left instead.

No reason. No destination. Just a different direction with unfamiliar ingredients in the backseat and no tested recipe for what came next.

The streets looked different—of course they did—but more importantly, they felt different. I wasn’t navigating. I was noticing. A park I didn’t know existed. A row of old Craftsman houses. A corner store with hand-painted signage somehow surviving modern economics.

How long had all of this been here? How many times had I passed within a quarter mile and never seen it because I was following the optimal path?

The route home took fourteen minutes. Twice as long. Objectively inefficient. But I arrived with something I hadn’t brought home in months: attention.

I sat in the car another minute, thinking about Sarah and her hammer, the Maginot Line, the availability heuristic, all those patterns designed to keep us safe and small.

But mostly I thought about how the question was never about bell peppers or recipes or even traffic lights.

The question was whether I was still capable of wanting something I hadn’t wanted before. Whether my optimization systems had closed so tightly around known solutions that I’d forgotten how to recognize new problems worth solving.

Your best tool isn’t your enemy. But your relationship with it might be. Every time you reach for it automatically, you’re making two choices: one conscious, to use it; and one unconscious, to not see what else is there.¹⁵

The bell pepper was fine. The route home was fine. They were never the problem. The problem was believing the questions had already been answered.

Efficiency isn’t the enemy of a good life. But optimization without awareness is. You can be so good at getting somewhere you forget to ask if it’s still where you want to go.

I walked inside carrying ingredients I didn’t know how to cook, having seen streets that had been invisible yesterday.

Sometimes the opposite of a working solution isn’t failure.

Sometimes it’s just a left turn instead of a right one, and the willingness to arrive home seven minutes later with proof that other routes exist.

Footnotes

1. Yes, I’m aware I once told writers to avoid “here’s the thing.” Sometimes you have to break the rule to make the rule visible. Sometimes a verbal tic is the fingerprint of a mind thinking in real time and the act of breaking the rule becomes the evidence for the argument.
2. Bell pepper, onion, protein of choice, soy sauce, served over rice. It’s genuinely good. That’s the whole problem. Comfort foods are often disguises for decision fatigue, tiny edible routines masquerading as preference.
3. The famous example being Duncker’s candle problem: given a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and matches, most people can’t figure out how to attach the candle to the wall so it burns without dripping wax on the floor. Functional fixedness is when people see the box as merely a container to hold the tacks. The solution: empty the thumbtacks, use the box as a holder, tack the box to the wall. It’s such an elegant parable for imagination: we keep forgetting our props have understudies.
4. This is also why habits are so powerful and so dangerous. They’re the same mechanism. Your brain automates successful patterns to free up cognitive space for novelty. But when everything becomes automated, there are no novel problems left, just the polite tyranny of competence.
5. He actually did suggest making a spreadsheet to track which vending machines were most reliable after losing money to one twice. Columns for location, success rate, product availability. He achieved a level of empirical snack-science that should be terrifying. I respect the commitment to the bit.
6. To be fair to the French planners, they did consider the Belgian route but bet on Belgian resistance slowing any advance long enough to reposition. They simply underestimated the speed of tanks and the audacity of airplanes. Every age has its Maginot Line. Ours is probably the Google Sheet.
7. First described by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, whose joint career was basically an ongoing exposé titled You’re Not as Rational as You Think. If they’d stopped at ten biases, we might have listened. At forty-seven, it became a genre.
8. This is why people give terrible advice. They’re not trying to be unhelpful; they’re exporting what once worked for them in a landscape that no longer exists. Advice is nostalgia disguised as instruction.
9. Not her real name, but everything else is accurate. She’s now thriving after realizing her optimization skills could apply to creating scalable systems from scratch rather than fixing broken ones. Sometimes the tool isn’t wrong: you just had it pointed at yesterday.
10. This concept comes from system-dynamics work by Jay Forrester and others at MIT. The idea: success generates resources, which generate more success, creating a feedback loop. It explains why rich get richer, popular things get more popular, and why my to-do list keeps cloning itself overnight.
11. James Patterson has written roughly two hundred books, most following similar structures. Stephen King keeps revisiting small-town Maine and haunted writers. It’s not laziness; it’s proof that familiarity is a renewable resource—until it isn’t.
12. This might be the scariest part: you stop merely solving old problems the same way. You stop even seeing the new ones. It’s like living in a shrinking room that redecorates itself to look spacious.
13. There’s a photography principle called “exposure latitude”: brighten one area too much and you deepen the shadows elsewhere. Brains work the same way. Every refined strength is a darkroom of neglected curiosities.
14. Lamb, preserved lemons, chickpeas, and that harissa paste. No idea what I was making. It turned out fine—not amazing, not terrible. But fine felt revolutionary. Uncertainty had flavor again.
15. There’s a term in decision theory called “opportunity cost,” the value of the next-best alternative you give up when you choose. But that assumes you see the alternatives. The real cost of automation isn’t missing better options. It’s forgetting there were options at all.