You’re Pushing the System in the Wrong Direction (And That’s Why Nothing Changes)

Unpopular opinion: most of your effort is noise.

Not because you’re lazy. Not because you lack discipline. But because you’re applying force at the points that seem important while barely moving anything that actually matters.

There’s a line from Donella Meadows—the systems scientist who changed how we understand complexity—that has stuck with me since I first read it:

“Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in leverage points—places where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.”

And then she adds the real gut-punch: most people intuitively sense where those leverage points are. The problem is they push them in the wrong direction.

That’s what I want to break down today.

The Problem with Goals

Before we talk about systems, we need to address the most widespread mistake in personal productivity: confusing goals with systems.

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, put it better than anyone:

“Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best.”

Map that to your life: if your goal is to launch a SaaS, every day that passes without having launched it makes you a failure. Your brain processes it that way, even if you’re not aware of it. The psychological energy that state consumes is brutal.

A system, in contrast, is something you do regularly that increases your odds of success. You don’t have to “win” today. You just have to run the system.

The difference isn’t semantic. It’s structural. And structure matters far more than intention.

Where Leverage Actually Lives

Meadows identified a hierarchy of leverage points within any complex system. The most counterintuitive part of her work is this: the changes that are most immediately visible (numbers, parameters, flows) are those with the lowest real leverage.

The highest leverage points live at a completely different level: the goals of the system, and the paradigms that sustain it.

Practical example for any builder in 2026:

• Low leverage: optimizing your conversion rate a little more, adding a new feature, tweaking the price.
• High leverage: shifting the mental model from “I build products” to “I design systems that self-improve.”

It’s not that optimizations don’t matter. It’s that without shifting the paradigm, every optimization has a ceiling.

I learned this building projects over the past year. I could spend weeks adjusting the parameters of a tool and see marginal improvements. But when I changed the question I was asking—from “how do I improve this?” to “what feedback loop is holding this back?”—everything shifted.

The Loops That Decide Everything

There are two types of feedback loops, and once you see them, you see them everywhere.

Reinforcing Loop: amplifies change in the same direction. It can be virtuous or vicious. The programmer who learns a little each day improves their capacity to learn faster. The creator who publishes regularly gains more distribution, which motivates them to publish more. But also: the developer who never documents their code accumulates more technical debt, leaving less time to document.

Balancing Loop: counteracts change to maintain equilibrium. Your body regulates temperature. A mature business tends toward a stable revenue level without active intervention.

The critical insight is this: you don’t lack willpower. You’re fighting the wrong loop.

If you’re trying to build a daily writing habit and always fail, the right question isn’t “why don’t I have discipline?” It’s “what balancing loop is preventing this from taking off?” Maybe it’s the environment. Maybe the time of day. Maybe the absence of an idea-capture system that eliminates the friction of starting.

This isn’t a character problem. It’s an architecture problem.

Designing the System, Not Fighting It

Three concrete steps:

1. Identify which loop you’re in right now

Pick one area of your life or work that feels stuck. Ask yourself: am I in a reinforcing cycle or one that’s holding me back?

If you’ve gone a while without seeing real progress despite effort, there’s likely an active balancing loop you haven’t identified. It’s not bad luck. It’s the system responding to something.

2. Find the real leverage point

Not the superficial parameter (publish more, work more hours, try another tool). The paradigm underneath. The belief that shapes the entire system.

Some patterns I’ve seen repeat themselves:

• “I need the product to be perfect before showing it” → vicious loop of never validating in public.
• “Organic growth takes too long” → premature abandonment before the reinforcing loop has critical mass.
• “I’m a developer, not a salesperson” → an artificial limit that holds back any bootstrapped business.

3. Push in the right direction

Meadows makes it clear: it’s not just about finding the leverage point. It’s about understanding the direction. Many well-intentioned interventions worsen the problem because they push in the opposite direction from what they intend.

If you want to build a virtuous loop around creating technical content, pushing harder on “produce more” without solving distribution friction doesn’t work. The real leverage point might be shifting the paradigm: from “I write to teach” to “I publish to learn in public.” That mental shift transforms your entire relationship with the process.

The Question That Changes Everything

I’ve written before on this blog about incentives (Munger), leverage (Naval), and antifragility (Taleb). All those frameworks have something in common: they force you out of the level of symptoms and up to the level of systems.

In 2026, with more tools, more noise, and more options than ever, the competitive advantage isn’t in working harder. It’s in working within better systems.

The question I’ll leave you with isn’t “what am I going to do differently this week?”

It’s: “What paradigm is shaping everything I do, and is it pushing in the direction I actually want?”

This week, do this:

Pick one area where you feel stuck despite your effort. Identify whether you’re in a virtuous or vicious loop. Then ask yourself which leverage point you’d shift first: the parameter, the goal, or the paradigm?

Tell me in the comments what you find. I’m genuinely curious what loops people building things are seeing right now.