Notice What Still Works

When enough things go wrong at once, the mind reaches for a very satisfying, very dramatic solution: burn it all down. The routine is broken, so scrap the whole routine. The plan failed, so the plan was garbage. The month went sideways, so the year is a loss, and honestly, while we are demolishing things, maybe the whole life needs a gut renovation. There is a strange comfort in the full reset. It feels decisive. It photographs well.

Broken does not mean useless. Even a flooded house has a dry room, and the dry room is where you work from.

First, let us name why your brain cannot see the dry room, because we already met the culprit in Challenge 05. Psychologist Roy Baumeister's "bad is stronger than good" research shows that negative information seizes attention with several times the force of positive information. So when a system is 30 percent broken, your attention is standing in the 30 percent, taking flash photography, while the 70 percent that still functions hums along completely unappreciated. The full-reset urge is not a clear-eyed assessment. It is the negativity bias with a sledgehammer and a flair for drama.

Now for one of my favorite true stories in all of social science. In 1990, Jerry Sternin of Save the Children arrived in Vietnam with six months and almost no budget to address childhood malnutrition in poor villages. The standard playbook said: everything is broken, bring in outside solutions, overhaul it all. Sternin did the opposite. He asked a question that should be framed in gold: are there very poor families whose children are not malnourished? There were. And those mothers were doing small, odd, local things: adding tiny shrimp and crab from the rice paddies to meals, tossing in sweet potato greens everyone else considered low-class food, feeding smaller meals more often. Nothing exotic. Nothing imported. The solution was already alive inside the "broken" system, held by its least powerful members. Sternin built the whole program around spreading what already worked, and malnutrition plummeted, sustainably, in ways decades of outside-in programs had never achieved. The approach became famous as positive deviance, and its core move is this exact challenge: before you fix what is broken, find what is inexplicably working, and feed it.

Therapy discovered the same lever. Solution-focused brief therapy, developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, became one of the most widely used approaches in the world by more or less refusing to excavate problems all day. Its signature tool is the exception question: when does the problem not happen? The insomniac slept fine on Thursday; what was different about Thursday? The couple did not fight on the drive to the lake; what were they doing right in that car? Decades of clinical use rests on the insight that the exceptions are not flukes. They are working machinery, already installed, already proven in your exact life, waiting to be noticed and scaled. You do not have to invent the solution. You mostly have to find where it already occurred and do that on purpose.

This is Challenge 20 in The Adaptability Edit, and coming at the end of this first stretch of the workbook, it lands like a quiet thesis statement for your AQ, your Adaptability Quotient, the measure of how well you stay workable when change stops asking permission. Because here is what twenty challenges of research keep converging on: adaptation is almost never total reinvention. It is translation, adjustment, reallocation, one workable move at a time, and every one of those moves needs a place to stand. The solid part is the place to stand. Torch it in the name of a fresh start, and you have not cleared the way for progress. You have demolished the launchpad.

Progress does not always begin with a reset. Sometimes it begins with respect for the part that still holds.

Now, the challenge itself. Capture one part of your day, routine, or system that is still working. Write it down and look at it, actually look, the way the reflection page insists: not admiring the damage, locating the real starting point. Then build your next move from that part instead of assuming everything has to start over. The morning walk that still happens? Attach the next habit to it. The one friendship that still nourishes? Schedule it first. The dry room becomes the base camp.

Building from the part that still works can keep progress moving without demanding a full reset. The solid part is often enough to start from, even when the rest still feels unfinished.

Notice that this is Challenge 09's move aimed outward. Use What You Already Know inventoried the skills that survived the change; this one inventories the structures. Both are the same defiant act of accounting in a season that keeps trying to convince you the balance is zero. It never was. It is not now.

At the end of the day, sit with the three prompts: what surprised me today, what worked, and what I resisted. And would you look at that: what worked has been sitting in the workbook's reflection prompts since Challenge 01, quietly running Sternin's question on your life once a day. Today it gets to be the headline instead of the middle child. Here is my wager for the surprise column: the working list is longer than the mood predicted. It nearly always is. That is not optimism. That is Baumeister's bias, corrected on paper.

And this challenge's five "I can" statements:

I can see what works. I can build from solid. I can skip the reset. I can start where I am. I can move smarter.

Noticing what still works keeps the work moving without starting from zero. This is your Adaptability Quotient at its most grown-up: standing in a mess, refusing the sledgehammer, and quietly asking the only question that rebuilds anything: what is still holding, and how do we build from there?

What would change if you trusted the solid part before trying to rebuild the whole thing?

This is Challenge 20 in The Adaptability Edit, Notice What Still Works. If you want to work through it, and the eighty-one that follow it, you can get your own copy at jess-i-can.com.

Come with me one challenge at a time.