Concept
Gravity Problems
A gravity problem is a situation you cannot act on: a circumstance rather than a problem. The only useful move is to accept it and reframe the stuck point into something you can actually change.
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans start Designing Your Life with a blunt test: if you cannot act on something, it is not a problem. It is a circumstance. Their favourite example is gravity. No one solves gravity, yet engineers build lighter bikes. They treat the fixed fact as a design input instead of arguing with it. Most of us carry personal versions of gravity, such as “my sector pays badly”, “my city has no jobs like that” or “I'm too old to switch”. We spend years pushing against them as if effort could move them. That pushing feels responsible but produces nothing. The design move is an honest sort: is this truly immovable, or just hard? If it is immovable, accept it as a constraint. Then look beside it for a smaller problem you can act on. Some “gravity” is merely difficult, and that you keep working on.
A real-life example
Leyla is a museum educator who has spent three years angry that museums pay poorly. She can't change sector pay scales. That is gravity. So she reframes: where do her skills earn more? She books two coffees with people who run corporate training programmes. She learns they value exactly her workshop design and starts a weekend pilot. The pay scale didn't move. Her options did.
How to use it
- 1Write the stuck point in one sentence and ask: could anyone act on this in the next year? If not, label it gravity.
- 2Accept it out loud as a constraint. Then list three smaller problems next to it that you can act on this month.
- 3Pick one and test it cheaply, with a conversation or a small experiment, before you commit to any big move.