Shaw's real point isn't that we need to be flexible—it's that **intellectual stubbornness is the deepest form of paralysis**. You can work yourself to exhaustion and still accomplish nothing if your thinking remains fixed, because you'll keep applying yesterday's solutions to today's problems. A manager insisting that remote work destroys productivity, despite contrary evidence piling up in her own department, becomes her company's invisible anchor. The quote cuts deeper than "be open-minded"; it suggests that changing your circumstances actually *requires* changing your convictions first—the external transformation follows the internal one.