Stop Pounding Walls, Start Finding Better Doors
Created at: September 20, 2025
Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door. — Coco Chanel
Seeing the Wall for What It Is
Chanel’s sentence reframes effort: some barriers are not waiting to yield; they are signaling a mismatch between our approach and reality. A wall, in this metaphor, is a constraint that brute force cannot meaningfully change. Rather than glorifying endurance for its own sake, the line invites discernment—asking whether the energy we expend is actually creating options. This vision mirrors Chanel’s own design ethos: instead of reshaping women to fit rigid fashions, she reshaped fashion to fit women. In doing so, she modeled a principle of intelligent redirection—stop insisting on passage where none exists, and instead reimagine the path.
The Hidden Cost of Futile Effort
Once we recognize the wall, the next insight is economic: every hour spent pounding it is an hour not spent exploring alternatives. Opportunity cost makes futile persistence doubly expensive, draining time, attention, and morale. Psychology compounds the problem through the sunk-cost effect, where prior investment tempts us to keep going even when prospects dim. Arkes and Blumer’s classic study on sunk costs (1985) shows how people irrationally escalate commitment to losing courses of action, simply because they have invested already. Chanel’s admonition counteracts that bias; it tells us that wisdom often lies in reallocating effort, not intensifying it.
Control, Acceptance, and Strategic Release
To decide when to redirect, a Stoic lens helps: Epictetus’s Enchiridion (c. 125 CE) urges us to separate what we control from what we do not. Likewise, the Serenity Prayer, often attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr (c. 1930s), seeks courage to change the changeable and serenity to accept the rest. In practical terms, this means treating immovable constraints as design inputs rather than enemies. When market timing, gatekeepers, or physics won’t budge, the rational response is not louder insistence but a change in strategy—shifting from battering the wall to locating, building, or choosing another door.
Pivoting as a Creative, Not Desperate, Move
If release is not surrender, what is it? It is a pivot—an experiment in a new direction informed by what failed. In business, Slack emerged from internal tools developed during the shelved game Glitch (2012–2014), while Instagram grew from simplifying the overbuilt app Burbn (2010) to focus on photos. Neither story is about quitting ambition; both show ambition changing shape to match reality. The same logic applies to careers and research: when hypotheses are falsified, we refine or replace them. Thus, Chanel’s counsel champions adaptability—the creative courage to seek the right opening, not vindication from the wrong wall.
Chanel’s Own Practice of Redirection
Chanel did not force the corseted silhouette to make room for ease; she pioneered jersey daywear for women in the 1910s, turning a humble fabric into liberation. Later, after closing her house in 1939, she staged a controversial comeback in 1954 and won anew by doubling down on modern simplicity rather than reviving prewar formulas. Her trajectory demonstrates that progress often comes from reconfiguring constraints into advantages—choosing a different material, silhouette, or moment—rather than insisting the old gatekeepers change. In effect, she stopped pounding and started designing new doors, then invited the world through them.
Turning Insight Into Daily Practice
Finally, we can operationalize this mindset. Set kill criteria in advance—conditions under which you will stop or pivot—so decisions are not hijacked by sunk costs. Use time-boxed experiments and premortems (Gary Klein, 2007) to imagine failure early and reroute cheaply. Cycle through the OODA loop—observe, orient, decide, act (John Boyd)—to avoid fixating on a single path. And keep a stop-doing list alongside your to-do list to reclaim resources. By institutionalizing redirection, you transform Chanel’s warning into a habit: spare your strength on the wall, and spend it designing the next door.