Here is a brief clip from an interview Steve Jobs did in 1995 while he was at Next. It neatly captures an important attitude about dealing with complex systems:
Whenever you poke at a system, the system pokes back. If you grew up with siblings, you learned this at a visceral level.Â
Too many of us take a limited lesson from those experiences; we come to believe that we are powerless in the face of a larger, more powerful system (or sibling). The better lesson, which Jobs embodied in his life, is to seek places and directions to poke where your impact can be amplified.