Aristotle's least quoted observation about ruin is not about vice — it is about virtue applied past its proper scope. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he argues that every excellence has a natural range, and deployed beyond that range, it becomes the very thing that destroys you. Courage past its limit is recklessness. Economy past its limit is miserliness. But the behavioral psychologist Paul Watzlawick, working two millennia later, made the pattern clinical: he called it 'more of the same' — the mechanism by which people facing a failing solution increase its dosage. The person who built their life on discipline runs it into relationships until the relationships die. The person who built security through control tightens the grip until the thing they were holding breaks. What strips everything away is rarely a weakness that arrives from outside. It is usually a genuine strength, one that worked, one that you trusted, one that you kept applying after the problem it solved had quietly changed shape.

Which strength of yours — something that has genuinely served you — are you currently applying in a domain where it is no longer the right tool?

Drawing from Aristotelian ethics / Systems theory (Watzlawick) — Paul Watzlawick (Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution, 1974), cross-referenced with Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, c. 350 BCE)