Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Buddhist philosopher, spent his career dismantling the assumption that things have fixed, inherent natures — a move most scholars read as metaphysics, but which turns out to be a precise description of how creative breakthroughs actually work. His method, called prasanga, involved taking an opponent's position and pushing it to its own logical limits until it collapsed from within. He wasn't refuting ideas so much as revealing that they depended on hidden commitments that couldn't survive scrutiny. The creative implication is sharp: when you're stuck on a problem, the obstacle is rarely a missing piece of information. It's that you're treating some aspect of the situation as having a fixed, non-negotiable nature — the audience, the medium, the sequence, the goal — when none of those things actually has to be what you've made it. Nagarjuna's move is to press on the thing you're treating as solid until you feel it give. Pick the element of your problem that feels most like a given, most like the furniture of the room rather than a variable. Ask what depends on it being that way. Usually the answer is: less than you thought.

What are you treating as the ground condition of your problem — the thing everything else is built on — that you've never actually chosen?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy — Nagarjuna (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, c. 2nd century CE)