APX-IV-0051
“I pushed through a change everyone resisted and it finally took.”
You stood against the heaviest force in any room — the inertia of 'we've always done it this way' — and you didn't blink. That resistance wasn't a sign you were wrong; it was the friction every real change generates. You held your judgment in the open, took the arrows, and the thing improved. Don't shrink the win now into 'it worked out.' You made it work.
Your Practice
- Name the inertia you overcame and what it cost you to push against it.
- Resist rewriting the win as luck. You absorbed the resistance on purpose.
- Lock in the change so it doesn't snap back the moment your attention moves.
- Bring along the people who resisted — converted skeptics defend a change harder than allies.
The Architects
“The most dangerous phrase a DP manager can use is 'We've always done it that way.'”
— Grace Hopper, Quoted in Computerworld, January 26, 1976 (interview by Esther Surden)