Cambridge-Trained Physicist on Why Capable People Stay Stuck

Anand Rao works on why trying harder keeps stubborn patterns in place. He trained as a theoretical physicist at Cambridge, then spent two decades working out what was happening in oil fields deep underground from a few indirect measurements.

For three decades he has also studied something even more complicated: how people change — the launch that keeps slipping, the decision put off for years, the argument that keeps repeating. He spent three of those years teaching at a coaching school, around thirty coaches a week.

He describes his passion as a search for Surprisingly Elegant Change. His private clients — among them the CEO of Turkey’s largest natural-gas company and an HR director at Yale — tend to arrive already successful and stuck on the one thing success hasn’t fixed. What they describe afterwards is a struggle carried for years gone in weeks, without the fight they expected.

Anand Rao trained as a theoretical physicist at Cambridge, spent two decades working out what was happening deep inside oil fields, and three decades studying something even more complicated: how people change. He works with founders, executives and doctors, and has watched struggles carried for years change in weeks. He describes his passion as a search for Surprisingly Elegant Change. In his words: “Don’t use willpower to fight your current system, use your intelligence to evolve your current system by progressively reorganizing it.”