System or exceptions.

Exceptions are the one-time changes that are needed in case of emergencies. Once they are taken care of, they give us an opportunity to make changes at the system level. But, if all we do is to work on handling the exception without making the requisite changes in the system, we are going to end up back in an emergency sooner or later.

More often than not, our goals are focussed on making exceptions, one-time changes, to either our financial situation, our health or our relationships. These may be good motivators to get us started but what we need to be mindful of is to make design changes in our systems so that these exceptions may no longer be needed.

Another example of this is the climate change emergency which requires us to make exceptions to try and keep the earth's temperature in a certain limit. But unless we make system level changes of transitioning to better sources of energy and better materials, we would only be delaying the problem, not solving it.