I woke up this morning in a strange place. An Airbnb. Far from where I live.
The curtains here are paper-thin. The light pours in too early. The bedding is soft—yes—but not mine.
There’s a strange coffee contraption on the counter. An assortment of K-Cups I don’t know how to use.
A microcosm of change.
No coffee this morning. Not yet. It’s fine. I’m fine.
Saying
You’ve heard it before. You’ve probably said it yourself. Maybe to someone going through something. Maybe to yourself, in a whisper.
Change is hard.
It is. But then what?
What do you do when everything shifts? To that, I offer another saying:
“To change with change is the changeless state.” — Bruce Lee
I heard it more than a decade ago. It’s stayed with me ever since. Because when change shows up, I try to remember:
The goal isn’t to control it. The goal is to move with it. To adapt.
Adapt
So—what does that actually look like?
Right now, I’m sitting cross-legged in this Airbnb’s living room. My laptop is balanced on a glass coffee table. I’m drinking a cup of hot water.
(Not ideal, but it’s warm. I’ll find coffee later.)
It’s not my usual setup.
At home, I have everything dialed in. My monitor. My keyboard. My stationery. Even my morning coffee—precisely two minutes to make.
And yet—I’m still doing the thing. I’m writing my blog post.
That’s what adaptation looks like. Not dramatic. Not loud. Just continuing.
It’s taken me years to make peace with that kind of shift. To simplify my tools. To let go of perfect setups.
I used to use two monitors. Now, just one. I used to have a clicky mechanical keyboard. Now, I use the Apple Magic Keyboard—the same one built into my laptop.
But this isn’t about stuff.
It’s about separating the task from the tools. It’s about being able to do the work, even when the environment changes. When everything changes.
If I didn’t have my laptop today, I’d write this post by hand. It wouldn’t get published yet—and that’s fine.
Adaptation doesn’t require resolution. You don’t need to fix your environment before you begin. You begin anyway.
Shift
Changing yourself is one thing. Changing a group? That’s way harder. The challenge of change isn’t just internal. It’s relational.
That’s why broken processes stick around. That’s why meetings drag on—because that’s how we’ve always done it.
And that’s why change feels so disruptive: Because people don’t always know how to move with it.
If you’re trying to make change—for yourself, for someone else, for a team—just remember:
Change will still happen. It always does.
But if you can adapt—if you can keep going in unfamiliar light, on an unfamiliar couch, with no coffee and no perfect setup— you’ll experience it differently.
You’ll still see the shifts. You just won’t get knocked over by them.
Flow
When things change, it’s easy to freeze. To focus on what’s missing. To wait until everything feels “right” again before you begin. But the more you wait, the harder it gets to restart. Or even get started.
What’s helped me—again and again—is to stay in motion. Not fast. Not perfect. Just moving. Just staying close to the thing.
That’s what flow is.
Not a magic state. Not a productivity buzzword. Not a four-hour time block with noise-canceling headphones and a perfect setup.
Flow is a distance. Between you and the thing you want to do.
Sometimes it’s wide. Full of friction. Tools. Expectations. Excuses.
But sometimes it’s small. Just you, in an unfamiliar living room, cross-legged on a couch. With hot water in a mug. And the choice to begin.
When you reduce that distance—when you strip away everything that says “not yet”—you get to the work faster.
You get to yourself faster.
And the more you practice that, the less disruptive change feels. Not because the change stops. But because you’ve learned how to move through it.