Have you ever been trapped in a problem so entangled with conflicting demands, that every attempt to solve it only tightens the knot? You argue both sides, weigh every option, and yet the harder you pull, the more stuck you become.
This is when you need to step back, breathe, and look at the problem from a higher vantage point – and then, sometimes a radical third way appears.
Consider “Einstein’s Leap.”
In the early 1900s, Newtonian physics was crumbling. Light, motion, and electricity defied old rules, and Einstein’s special relativity, while revolutionary, still couldn’t reconcile gravity. Scientists were frantically patching-up the old theories and piled equations after equations onto Newton’s failing framework, creating chaos.
Then Einstein stepped back and had a sudden insight, that he’d later call: “the happiest thought of my life.” He imagined a man in free fall from a house roof and realized that, during the fall, the man wouldn’t feel his own weight, he’d feel weightlessness.
That insight became the seed of General Relativity. A theory so elegant it became the foundation of modern cosmology, technology, and our understanding of the universe. All because he stopped trying to force gravity into the old framework.
This is how it works. You step back. You give up on the ‘sunk cost fallacy’ that tells you you’ve wasted years on this already so you must stick with it. You step away from the ‘fallacy of the false dilemma’ that tells you that there can only ever be two opposing options, and one must be right.
You step up into the imagination and free associate from a perspective above.
Need more proof? Well, there’s the astronomer, Copernicus.
Four centuries earlier, astronomy was just as stuck. Ptolemy’s Earth-centered model had dominated for 1,400 years, but there was no way to explain why planets sometimes looped backward in the sky. The math worked, barely, but it was a knotted mess. Astronomers kept adding more adjustments, like scribbling corrections in the margins of a flawed manuscript.
Copernicus stepped back, mentally rewinding the cosmos, and asked a different question: What if Earth isn’t the center?
The Greeks had floated the idea, but Copernicus did the math, proving the Sun-centered model simplified and explained all planetary motion.
His 1543 breakthrough shattered the medieval worldview. Galileo’s telescope later confirmed it, Kepler perfected it, and today we know: the solar system is heliocentric.
In both cases, the solution came from questioning the framework itself.
So next time you’re gridlocked in a business strategy, a relationship, or a creative block, pause. Step back. Ask yourself: What am I assuming that might be wrong? Is there a bigger pattern I’m not seeing? What if the opposite of my premise is true?
We often spend most of our time trying to solve problems within the system. Optimizing. Adjusting. Adding more epicycles. But sometimes, the system is the problem.
Einstein didn’t feel trapped by gravity. He imagined falling, and in that weightlessness, he found his answer.
