There's a peculiar trap that high-performers fall into: the harder things get, the harder they push — and the harder they push, the more brittle they become. The Zen teacher Dogen called this 'adding frost to snow' — piling effort onto effort until the structure collapses under its own weight. What's striking is that modern leadership researcher Karl Weick found something similar studying organizational crises: the teams that survived weren't the ones with the most drive, but the ones who could 'drop their tools' — literally and metaphorically — and respond freshly to what was actually in front of them, rather than what their training told them should be there. Perseverance, it turns out, isn't the same as relentlessness. Today, notice where you're adding frost to snow — where your effort has quietly become the obstacle.

Where in your work are you pushing harder at something that more effort is clearly not fixing?

Drawing from Zen Buddhism combined with Organizational Psychology — Dogen Zenji and Karl Weick