Dear friend,
I want to write to you about a question I have not been able to put down for the last couple of weeks. It arrived from an unlikely direction and turned into something much larger than I expected, so I am writing it out and sending it to you the way I would say it if we were sitting together.
We have been building an AI, a kind of ontological coach, and one of our early advisers put a hard challenge to us. He asked for a measure. Some real way to see whether the thing actually works, first for one person, then for a team, a family, a company. It is a fair request. But it stopped us cold, because before you can measure a breakthrough you have to say what one is.
And once you try to say it plainly, you find you are no longer talking about software. You are talking about the oldest question there is. Can a person change? And if they can, what is the moment when it happens? And what actually counts for a breakthrough?
Let me start with the theory of change almost all of us carry without ever having chosen it.
It goes like this. You look at your life, you name what dissatisfies you, you make a plan, and you execute the plan. Diagnose, decide, execute. It is the logic of the machine, and on machines it works beautifully. On a human being it mostly does not work, and I want to say why, because the failure is not a failure of your willpower. It is built into the theory itself.
The first trouble is with who is holding the pen. When you sit down to redesign yourself, the one drawing up the plan is the very self that must undergo the change. The plan comes out of the same worldview, the same habits of seeing, the same moods, that produced the life you are trying to leave. So the plan, however ambitious, tends to be more of the same in a nicer outfit. You get a shinier version of precisely who you already were. There is an old French line for this. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. That proverb is the epitaph of the planning theory of change.
The second trouble is that this theory treats a declaration as if it were an accomplishment. I announce that I will be patient, or disciplined, or unafraid, and I quietly mistake the saying for the becoming. But a declaration is a beginning, not a result. It only turns real if it becomes new practices, new promises, new conversations, carried over time, especially through the ordinary moments when the old self comes roaring back. The planning mind wants to skip all of that. It wants the finished person by Monday. And when Monday comes and the old habit is still there, we conclude we have failed, or worse, that change was never possible for someone like us.
I have watched this play out in well-meaning clients for many years. Someone leaves a powerful conversation glowing, certain they have finally slain the thing that has haunted them. “I killed it,” they say. “I dominated it.” “I am not that person anymore.”
I slow them down in that moment, because I have seen what tends to come next. Life arrives, the pattern returns, and the very height of the earlier certainty becomes the depth of the later disappointment. The problem was never the person or their intention. The problem was a picture of change that promised a permanent victory no human being can actually deliver.
So if change is not diagnose, decide, execute, then what is it?
Here I have to borrow from Thomas Kuhn, who spent his life studying not people but science, and the way science actually shifts. Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, noticed that a field does not move to a new understanding by politely adding one more fact to the old picture. For a long stretch the old picture holds, absorbing every anomaly, explaining everything away. And then, not by argument but by something closer to a sudden switch of gestalt, the whole arrangement reorganizes, and what was invisible a moment ago becomes obvious. He described it as the scales falling from the eyes, a flash of intuition through which a new paradigm is born.
A life changes in the same shape. Not by accumulating better information about your problem, but by a reorganization of the whole, after which you simply see differently and cannot go back to not seeing. Which is why I have come to think a breakthrough is not the moment you finally fix yourself. It is the moment you see what is in the way, and what is possible if you deal with it.
Let me lay out where it actually happens, because it is humbler and closer than people expect.
The first moment is one almost nobody counts, and it is already a breakthrough. It is the moment a person stops managing an appearance and acknowledges their stuckness. “I have a breakdown here. I am stuck. This has me.” To bring a real difficulty forward, into a conversation where it can finally be looked at, takes courage, and it changes your footing toward the thing in that instant. You are no longer only suffering it. You have owned it. That owning is the first crack in the wall, and many people never take that step in their whole lives.
The second moment is the flash. You suddenly see what has been standing in your way. The assessment you had been carrying as if it were plain truth. The waste you had been quietly protecting. The story you did not know you were living inside. Nothing in the furniture of your life has moved, and yet everything is different, because you are different. You are now the one who can see it.
Now here is a subtlety that will change how you read your own progress. We tend to believe that action is when the body moves, when a promise gets made, when a call is placed. But in the tradition I work in, the seeing is itself an action. When a new language takes root in you, a new world has already opened, and you are standing in it. The breakthrough has happened, in the seeing. It does not wait for you to go and do something about it. What comes after, making an assessment to someone you have been avoiding, a request, an offer, a promise, a step, is real and it matters, but it is the mobilization, not the toll you must pay for the seeing to count.
And here is the part I most want to leave with you. When the breakthrough does not come, when you find yourself once again being exactly the way you have always been, nothing has gone wrong with you. That way of being is what Heidegger calls your thrownness. You did not choose the ground you started from, and you cannot climb around behind it. But thrownness is only half of the story.
My friend B. Scot Rousse titled his doctoral dissertation Thrown Projection, and those two words hold the whole of it. We are thrown, out of a past we were handed. And we are projection, always already reaching out ahead of ourselves toward who we are not yet. B. calls that reaching the active dimension of a human life. Your past is the runway, not the cage. To see your own thrownness starkly, and to see in the same glance that you are also aimed at possibility, that seeing is itself the breakthrough. What it opens is not a list of things to do. It is a world of possibilities.
So I will leave you with the question that started all of this, and hand it to you rather than answer it. What would count, for you, as a breakthrough? My own answer, after all these years and this strange detour through building an AI, is quieter than it used to be. You do not have to have conquered anything. You only have to be willing to own the breakdown, and to let yourself see. And that is available to you today, in the next courageous conversation you are willing to have, including the one you have with yourself.
With care,Saqib