It doesn't matter how challenging the situation is - or how much time we have - we can always secure dramatically better outcomes and experiences than we are currently securing.   It's perfectly - unavoidably - natural to be skeptical of this claim, but it is demonstrably, unequivocally true.

There are no exceptions: every single situation can be improved dramatically - no matter how intractable it may seem.

Dramatic improvement arises from leverage.  If things improve dramatically, leverage must have been employed.  If leverage is employed advantageously, the improvement will be dramatic.

Truly challenging situations are challenging because of dynamic complexity - strong and complex interactions between the elements of the situation.  So the more challenging the situation (the greater the dynamic complexity) the greater the leverage.  And the greater the leverage the more dramatic the potential for improvement.

There is no limit to leverage, because reality is infinitely leveragable.  The key to dramatic improvement is to find the leverage points and figure out how to use them to secure the improvements we seek.

There is always another level of leverage – hidden, in plain hindsight, in the reality beyond the one we can currently see. The problem is that we can't see those leverage points, until we see them, because they are beyond our current capability to see - not because they aren't there.

One of the primary reasons that we can't see leverage points, is because they are counter-intuitive to the previous level of insight.  It's only when we see and truly understand them that they begin to make sense.

This is a non-trivial human-condition problem, rooted in our physiology: we don't (can't) know - or take into consideration or take advantage of - what we don't realise that we don't know we don't know.  It's called unconscious incognizance and it comes in many forms, ranging between the extremes of being unable to "see" solutions we're deliberately looking for and afterwards turn out to be in front of our noses, to  "forgetting" key elements of a situation or solution that we are intimately familiar with, but not taking into consideration at the time.

Unconscious Incognizance is compounded by the Half-life of One Sleep problem: when we're first exposed to new insights, we lose 50% of the new insight a day, unless we recreate and reinforce the new insight.  This is because the insight is established virtually at first, commandeering existing neural networks and connections temporarily - and only gets established physiologically and "permenantly" through repetition under neuroplasticity-inducing conditions.

It's harder to overcome unconscious incognizance than one might think, because we're already doing the best we can to gain deeper insight – and are easily convinced that, because we can't see beyond the leverage points we've already identified, no further leverage points exist.

We're perpetually trapped within our own thinking. We think we're seeing reality as it really is, but we're really only seeing what we're able to see, recognise and make sense of.  And every time we escape one layer of unconscious incognizance – an escape which comes about only when a specific combination of "crucible" conditions exist – we find ourselves trapped in the next level of insight. And the cycle repeats. Infinitum.

So we settle – individually and collectively – for mediocrity, because it seems the best - the only - option we have.

Dynamically complex adaptive systems (which is what challenging situations are) are made up of repeating patterns.  We seldom see the patterns, because our education system doesn't teach us to look for patterns when we get stuck.  Instead it teaches us to analyse (break things into their component parts), which makes the interactions and the patterns across them even harder to see.  The patterns that we're most interested in are dramatic improvement (leverage point) patterns, of course.  

The thing is that, although unconscious incognizance prevents us from seeing the next-level leverage points themselves, it doesn't prevent us from seeing the repeating patterns that they follow.

Once we can see the patterns across the challenges we face - and the patterns across the interventions we can think of (especially the counter-intuitive ones) we can use these patterns as templates and exemplars – cognitive scaffolding – for finding the next-level leverage points. This enables us to effectively overcome the unconscious incognizance problem, by giving us the form of what we don't know, so that – in a sense – we now know what we don't know looks like.  And, because the patterns repeat throughout the situation, we'll discover that the new leverage points will incorporate key elements of the patterns we already know and use - arranged in a slightly different - counter-intuitive - way.