Flexibility

There’s a version of persistence that looks like strength but is actually stubbornness wearing a good suit. You’ve probably met people who embody it. They set a goal, they commit to a plan, and then when circumstances change, when the evidence suggests something isn’t working, when a better path emerges right in front of them, they keep going anyway.

They call it determination. They call it not being a quitter. What they’re actually doing is being inflexible.

Flexibility

Flexibility isn’t the opposite of determination or commitment; instead, it’s what makes commitment sustainable. Your goals can remain fixed while your approach adapts.

In fact, the most effective people you’ll encounter in any field aren’t the ones who never change course. They’re the ones who change course intelligently, without losing sight of where they’re trying to get to.

I’ve watched this play out in medicine, sometimes with life-or-death consequences. When I’m treating a patient with a complex condition, my goal is constant. I want them better. But the path to better is rarely linear. A treatment that was working stops working. A symptom that seemed secondary turns out to be central. New information comes in. So an inflexible approach — ‘this is the plan, and we’re sticking to it regardless’ — can actively harm the patient. The willingness to reassess, to update my thinking based on new evidence, isn’t a weakness. It’s good medicine.

Research on adaptive expertise shows that the most skilled practitioners in complex fields — medicine, engineering, and military strategy — aren’t those who execute predetermined plans most faithfully. They’re the ones who read changing situations most accurately and adjust their approach accordingly (Hatano & Inagaki, 1986).

Expertise isn’t knowing what to do. It’s knowing when to do something different.

Goals and Methods

One of the most common traps I see is that people confuse the goal with the methods needed to get there.

They become so attached to the specific route and methods they planned beforehand that abandoning that route or methodology makes them feel like they are abandoning the goal itself.

But your goal is getting to the destination, not always how. The method you use or the route you take is just your current best guess about how to do that. When the route is blocked, your commitment to the destination should be exactly what motivates you to find an alternative route.

Psychological research on cognitive flexibility shows that the ability to shift mental frameworks in response to new information is one of the strongest predictors of problem-solving ability (Diamond, 2013). Cognitive rigidity — difficulty shifting mental set — is associated with higher rates of anxiety, depression, and failure to adapt to changed circumstances. Your brain’s ability to update its operating assumptions isn’t a vulnerability. It’s one of your most valuable assets.

No Plan Survives First Contact

There’s a military maxim, usually traced to the Prussian field marshal Helmuth von Moltke, that’s relevant here: no plan survives contact with the enemy. Not because planning is pointless — it absolutely isn’t — but because the enemy doesn’t know your plan and isn’t going to cooperate with it. The most dangerous soldiers aren’t the ones who plan poorly. They’re the ones who can’t adapt when their excellent plan meets reality. The same principle applies everywhere. Your plan is built on assumptions, and some of those assumptions will be wrong. Flexibility is what you do when you discover which ones are wrong and adjust your approach with the new information you have.

The Curse of Stubbornness

The challenge is that inflexibility often masquerades as virtue, and stubbornness looks like commitment. Rigidity looks like reliability. The person who never changes their mind can appear to have strong convictions, and there are situations where strong convictions really do matter. But conviction about your values is different from conviction about your methods. You can be absolutely unwavering about where you want to go while remaining entirely open about how you’re going to get there.

Here’s something worth sitting with. The sunk cost fallacy is one of the most expensive cognitive errors you’ll make in your lifetime. It’s the tendency to keep investing in a failing course of action because you’ve already invested heavily in it. The money spent, the years given, the energy poured in — these things are gone regardless of what you do next. They don’t get recovered by doubling down. But your brain, wired for loss aversion, treats them as debts you’re still paying rather than costs already incurred. Recognising this isn’t defeatism. It’s the clearest thinking you can do about your actual situation.

I want you to think about where you’re currently inflexible. Not inflexible in a principled way, but inflexible out of habit, out of sunk cost thinking, out of not wanting to admit that something isn’t working. Where are you executing a plan that the evidence has already told you needs revising? Where are you persisting with an approach because changing it would require acknowledging that you’ve been wrong?

That acknowledgement doesn’t cost you anything you actually need. It costs you only the story you’ve been telling yourself about why the current approach is the right one. And that story isn’t serving you. It’s just making you more comfortable while you stay stuck.

The most effective adapters I’ve ever encountered share a particular quality. They’re genuinely curious about being wrong. Not defensive, not threatened, but curious. When something isn’t working, their first instinct isn’t to push harder on the same approach. It’s to ask why it isn’t working and what that tells them about what might. That curiosity is a form of flexibility that extends beyond tactics into temperament. It’s not just being willing to change course. It’s being genuinely interested in what a change of course might reveal.

There’s also a quieter version of inflexibility that doesn’t look like stubbornness at all. It looks like loyalty. You stay in the relationship because you’ve been in it so long. You stay in the career because it’s what you trained for. You keep using an approach that stopped working years ago because changing it would mean admitting, out loud, that it was wrong. These situations feel like integrity from the inside. They look, from the outside, like someone building a monument to a decision they made when they had less information than they have now. You’re not the same person who made that choice. The world isn’t the same world. Give yourself permission to update.

Research on decision-making consistently shows that people with high cognitive flexibility make better decisions under uncertainty, recover more quickly from setbacks, and report higher levels of life satisfaction over time (Kashdan & Rottenberg, 2010). This isn’t because life treated them more kindly. It’s because they could reframe what happened, extract what was useful, and move in a different direction without treating the pivot as defeat. Flexibility doesn’t mean you don’t care about where you’re going. It means you care enough about the destination to keep finding new ways to get there.

The Flexibility Test

One practical test. Think of a plan you’re currently executing and ask yourself this question honestly. If you were starting fresh today, with everything you now know, would you choose this exact approach? If the answer is yes, carry on with full confidence. If the answer is no, or even a hesitant maybe, that hesitation is data. Not proof that the whole thing is wrong, but a signal worth listening to. Effective people check this regularly. They don’t treat their plans as commitments they’re obliged to honour regardless of what they learn. They treat them as working hypotheses, willing to revise them. That’s not a weakness. That’s how good thinking actually works.

You’ve invested a lot in getting to where you are. The path here mattered. Keep the goal, keep the destination, but where you go from here depends entirely on your willingness to let the route adapt as the terrain changes.

Further reading

1. Hatano, G., & Inagaki, K. (1986). Two courses of expertise. In H. Stevenson, H. Azuma, & K. Hakuta (Eds.), Child Development and Education in Japan. W.H. Freeman.
2. Diamond, A. (2013). Executive functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135–168.
3. Staw, B. M. (1981). The escalation of commitment to a course of action. Academy of Management Review, 6(4), 577–587.
4. Kashdan, T. B., & Rottenberg, J. (2010). Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(7), 865–878.
5. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.