Mencius, the fourth-century BCE Confucian thinker, argued that moral failure is almost never a shortage of capacity — it is a shortage of effort disguised as incapacity. His exact phrase was 'not doing' versus 'not able to': a man who refuses to jump over a mountain for the king is genuinely unable; a man who refuses to bend down and pick something up for an elder is simply not doing it. The distinction sounds obvious. It disappears completely in practice. In organisations, people routinely present 'we can't do this' when the accurate sentence is 'we have collectively decided the cost of doing this outweighs the reward.' Behavioral economists call this motivated reasoning; Mencius called it self-deception about the will. What makes his version sharper is the implied remedy: before diagnosing a capability gap on your team — or in yourself — the honest prior question is whether you are facing a mountain or a feather. Most blockers are feathers dressed as mountains. The practical discipline is to state, plainly and in private, which one you are actually dealing with.

Call to mind a project or change you have described as 'not feasible right now' — what is the honest version of that sentence if you replace 'not feasible' with either 'not willing to pay the cost of' or 'genuinely unable to'?

Drawing from Confucianism — Mencius (Mengzi)