Many of us have probably experienced situations where a solution seems reasonable, yet the outcome turns out very different from what we expected.
New features are added to a product, but users keep leaving. More control is introduced in a business, yet mistakes continue to happen. In personal goals, a new plan, a new approach, or a new system appears, only for everything to gradually return to where it started.
In moments like these, it is natural to look for problems in execution. It feels as though discipline, time, resources, or consistency were somehow missing.
Yes, that certainly happens. But there is another possibility that is much harder to notice. Sometimes the solution itself is perfectly logical, yet the problem is that it does not address the root cause. It is an uncomfortable thought because it challenges not the quality of the solution, but our understanding of the situation itself.
If a task is defined incorrectly, it is possible to work very hard while slowly moving farther away from the desired result. The more effort we invest, the harder it becomes to stop and ask a simple question: am I actually solving the right problem?
Perhaps that is why many problems live much longer than they should. We often mistake symptoms for causes and interpretations for facts. We treat the first explanation as the complete picture. This does not happen because people lack intelligence or experience. If anything, the opposite is true. The more complex a problem becomes, the easier it is to fill the gaps with our own assumptions.
Over the past few years, I found myself returning again and again to the subjects of thinking, decision-making, and achieving goals. Through AI, books, articles, and various practical approaches, I accumulated a great deal of material. It provided a broad perspective, but it did not answer the main question.
The question that stayed with me was not where to find yet another method. There are already plenty of methods. The real question was different: how do we know which tool is needed right now, for this particular problem and this specific situation?
At some point, I returned to TRIZ. It seemed to me that it could serve as a strong core for this kind of work: not as a collection of advice, but as a way to analyze problems through contradictions, available resources, and the real cost of a solution.
When combined with systems thinking, cognitive biases, Jobs To Be Done, Lean Startup, and other practical approaches, it becomes a useful framework for working through complex and seemingly dead-end problems.
That is how the book "Thirst for Reality" came to life. It is a book about seeing problems more clearly, finding stronger solutions, and acting without self-deception. It explores contradictions that hold us back, systems that create unexpected consequences, questions that matter more than ready-made answers, and why a good solution begins long before the solution itself.
The book is still being written. It will consist of 12 chapters, and the first 8 chapters are already available on Leanpub:
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