He Changed the Job. The City. The Relationship. The Same Problem Found Him Again.
A director-level executive changed companies three times in six years. Each time, the same dynamic reproduced itself: projects stalled, recognition withheld, opportunities that looked certain fell through. The circumstances were different. The pattern running underneath was identical. Antano Solar John names what primary approaches to changing your life miss entirely: circumstances are a consequence of installed patterns, not the source of them. Change the pattern and the circumstances reorganize.
Antano & HariniPersonal Evolution Scientists · Watch + read
Short on time? The video shows the change happen live. The article below walks it step by step.
The things to take from this
001Circumstances are an output, not an input
Kodak employed some of the primary capable business builders in history. They grew a multi-billion dollar empire. The same people, running an obsolete pattern, produced a different set of circumstances: collapse. The talent did not change. The pattern ran until the circumstances it generated became impossible to sustain. Your circumstances right now are the output of the patterns currently running in you.
002Patterns loop invisibly until they are interrupted
A marriage does not end because of a single event. It ends because one person stopped giving time to the other, and that gap accumulated across months and years while both partners stayed inside a cycle too tight to see clearly. The loop runs on its own. You do not need to choose it each day. You are simply in it, producing the same consequences, until something interrupts the pattern from the outside or you develop the capability to interrupt it yourself.
003Seeing the pattern requires stepping outside your own identity
Antano Solar John and Harini use 20 consultants not because they lack expertise in their own business, but because they deliberately evaluate each decision from multiple identities. What would X do? What would Y see? This is not a thought experiment. It is a capability: the ability to take on another person's logic and emotional state, not just imagine their perspective from inside your own. Children do this naturally. Adults have to reinstall it.
004Speed determines whether experimentation is viable
If changing a pattern takes ten years, and the change does not produce the result you need, you have lost ten years. The ability to quickly interrupt patterns and install new ones is what makes it possible to run real experiments in your own life. You try a new pattern in a relationship. If it does not move things, you try another. The speed of iteration is itself a capability, and it is one that can be installed.
Part 01
The Person Who Moved Cities Three Times and Found the Same Workplace
A senior manager leaves a company after two years. The culture is toxic, the politics are exhausting, and the leadership does not recognize good work. She joins a different company in a different city.
Within eighteen months, the same dynamics are present. She leaves again. A third company, a third city.
By year four, a pattern she cannot explain is visible in every performance review, every team meeting, every conversation with her manager. The circumstances changed each time. The pattern reproduced itself each time.
This is not bad luck. It is not a coincidence in the job market or an unusual run of poor leadership. The circumstances she keeps finding are consequences of the pattern installed in her, expressed in how she reads situations, how she responds to ambiguity, how she presents capability, and what she unconsciously signals about what she expects.
The environment responds to all of that, consistently, regardless of geography or company name.
Antano Solar John points to Kodak as the institutional version of this. Highly talented people. Extraordinary operational capability.
A pattern that worked brilliantly inside one era of the photography industry. When the world moved to digital cameras, Kodak's pattern did not move with it. The company stayed closed within its operational model while the entire market reorganized around a different set of assumptions.
The circumstances that followed, the collapse, the irrelevance, the eventual disappearance, were not caused by the market. They were the output of the pattern the company kept running.
You are not immune to this because you are self-aware. Awareness that a pattern exists does not give you the power to interrupt it. Antano Solar John distinguishes clearly between these two things.
He has seen many people who notice exactly what is happening in a failing relationship or a stalled career and still cannot interrupt the pattern producing those outcomes. Noticing and interrupting are different capabilities. One is cognitive. The other is installed at a level that changes what you actually do.
Part 02
Why Circumstances Are a Consequence, Not a Cause
The intuition many people operate on goes like this: if the circumstances change, the results change. New job, new outcomes. New relationship, new dynamics.
New city, new trajectory. This intuition is directionally backwards. Circumstances are downstream of patterns.
They are what patterns produce. Changing circumstances without changing the installed pattern means the new circumstances will gradually reorganize to match the old output. You will get the same marriage in a different partner.
The same career ceiling in a different company. The same financial ceiling in a different business.
The Kodak case makes this concrete. The company did not lack resources. It did not lack talented people.
It lacked the pattern that would allow it to step outside its own operational model and evaluate what was actually happening in the market. Antano Solar John identifies the core failure not as a strategic mistake but as a pattern loop: certain priorities, certain deliverables, certain time requirements, repeating on and on.
The loop ran so tightly that the people inside it could not see the digital camera era arriving because seeing it clearly would have required stepping outside a pattern that defined what counted as real and relevant.
The same loop runs in individuals. A person operating inside a time and money cycle has certain deliverables that demand attention every week. The loop is self-reinforcing.
The deliverables justify the time allocation. The time allocation produces the deliverables. The deliverables are never questioned because questioning them would require time that the deliverables consume.
Years pass inside this structure. The circumstances it produces, the income level, the career position, the relationship quality, look fixed because the pattern generating them runs without interruption.
Antano Solar John says the question to ask is not how to change circumstances but where this pattern is heading in two years, three years, ten years, across all aspects of life. The trajectory of the pattern is already visible if you step far enough outside the loop to see it. The divorce that seems sudden was visible years earlier in the accumulation of small withdrawals from the relationship.
The business collapse that looks sudden was visible years earlier in the pattern loop that kept the organization from seeing what the market was doing. Circumstances do not arrive without warning. They arrive as the predicted output of patterns that have been running for years.
The pattern, as a circuit. One trigger, and it runs the full loop on its own. A pattern runs from one source. That is why it returns no matter how much effort goes in at the surface.
Part 03
What Changing the Pattern Actually Requires
The distinction
Antano Solar John describes two capabilities that combine to make real change possible. The first is the ability to interrupt your own patterns. The second is the ability to step into another identity on demand, not metaphorically, but functionally: taking on another person's logic and emotional state rather than imagining their perspective from inside your own.
Neither of these is a technique you apply. Both are capabilities that get installed.
The identity shift piece is more demanding than it sounds. When a salesperson is told to put themselves in the buyer's shoes, they try to imagine what the buyer is thinking while their own logic and emotional state remain completely intact. The buyer they imagine is actually themselves, dressed in a different costume.
Antano Solar John describes a different process: shifting identity momentarily so that the person is operating from the buyer's actual logic and the buyer's actual emotional state. Children do this without instruction. Watch a child play house or play school.
They do not simulate the parent or the teacher. They become them, exaggerating the mannerisms, adopting the authority, inhabiting the state. As adults, this capability degrades unless it is reinstalled.
The pattern interruption capability is equally specific. Noticing a pattern is not interrupting it. The people Antano Solar John has worked with who fail to change are often the ones who notice primary clearly.
They can name the dynamic in the relationship, trace its history, identify the trigger points, and predict exactly what will happen next. And then the pattern runs anyway. Interrupting a pattern requires a different level of capability than understanding it.
It requires the ability to act from a state that is genuinely discontinuous with the pattern's logic, not just a modified version of the same state.
Excellence Installation Technology works at this level. Antano Solar John and Harini work directly with the installed patterns that produce circumstances, not with the circumstances themselves. A person who installs the pattern of genuine directness and integrity does not need to practice being direct in each new situation.
The pattern runs automatically. The circumstances it produces, relationships with different dynamics, professional environments that respond differently to their presence, outcomes that consistently reflect integrity, reorganize as a consequence. This is why the work produces results across all aspects of life simultaneously rather than incrementally improving one domain while others remain unchanged.
Part 04
When the Pattern Changes, Circumstances Reorganize
The reason fast pattern interruption matters is that it makes experimentation viable. Antano Solar John draws the distinction directly: if it takes ten years to change a pattern and the change does not produce the result you need, you have lost ten years. You cannot validate what is working.
You cannot run a second attempt. You are committed to a decade-long experiment with no ability to adjust course until it concludes. This is not how capable people build lives. It is how people get locked into trajectories they did not choose and cannot exit.
When pattern interruption is fast, a different relationship to experimentation becomes available. You interrupt a pattern in a relationship. You install a new one.
Within weeks, you observe how the relationship responds. If it moves in the direction you want, the new pattern is worth deepening. If it does not, you interrupt again and try a different approach.
The answers are not fixed in advance. Your situation is specific. The only way to find what works is to run experiments with enough speed that the experiments are informative rather than life-consuming.
Antano Solar John describes this as a superior capability: the ability to quickly bring about change in interactions and relationships. The word quickly is the variable that primary approaches to self-improvement ignore. Slow change means long feedback loops.
Long feedback loops mean you cannot tell whether the change you made was the right one or whether something else produced the result. Fast change means short feedback loops, real data, and the ability to build on what works rather than persisting with what does not.
When the pattern changes at the installed level, the circumstances do not need to be individually renegotiated. A person who installs a pattern that generates genuine trust does not need to rebuild trust separately in each relationship. The pattern runs in every relationship and produces trust as a consistent output.
The person who installs the pattern that Kodak's leadership never interrupted, the ability to step outside the operational model and evaluate the actual trajectory, does not need to remember to do this in each new situation. It happens automatically, as a function of the pattern that is now running. The circumstances that follow reflect the new pattern, not the old one, because circumstances were always a consequence. They were never the cause.
Free video series
Watch Antano work with this pattern live
The video series shows the session dynamic in full, including exactly where the intervention lands and what changes in the person in the room.
Surface work bounces. Advice, effort and willpower operate at the level of conscious thought, so they bounce off. The pattern runs one level below. Change it there, and the old loop has nothing left to run on.A × T = C™. Antano and Harini's formula: Adjustment times Time equals Consequences. Effort on the wrong adjustment barely moves the needle in decades. The right adjustment, made once at the source, compounds for years.
Free masterclass
Watch the change happen in one real person
One free masterclass with Antano Solar John. The shift that changes this exact pattern at its source.
PatternAn installed sequence of states, responses, and decisions that runs automatically across situations. Patterns are not habits in the behavioural sense. They operate at the level of identity and state, producing consistent outputs regardless of which circumstances they encounter.
InstallationThe process by which a new capability or pattern is integrated at the level where it runs automatically, without deliberate effort or conscious application. Installation is distinct from learning, understanding, or practising a behaviour. It changes what a person does by default, not what they know they should do.
Pattern LoopA self-reinforcing cycle in which a pattern produces circumstances that justify and sustain the pattern. The time and money cycle Antano Solar John describes is a pattern loop: deliverables justify time allocation, time allocation produces deliverables, deliverables are never questioned. The loop runs until something interrupts it from outside the cycle.
CircumstanceThe external conditions, outcomes, and events that appear in a person's life. In the Antano Solar John framework, circumstances are a consequence of installed patterns, not a cause. Changing circumstances without changing the pattern that produces them results in the new circumstances reorganizing to match the old output.
EITExcellence Installation Technology. The methodology developed by Antano Solar John and Harini for installing new patterns and capabilities at the level where they run automatically. EIT produces changes across all aspects of a person's life simultaneously because it operates on the patterns that generate circumstances, not on the circumstances themselves.
Questions people ask
Why do the same problems keep following me even when I change my job or relationship?
The circumstances changed. The pattern that produced those circumstances did not. A pattern installed in you expresses itself in how you read situations, respond to people, and signal what you expect from an environment. The environment responds to all of that consistently. New job, same pattern, same class of outcome. The answer is not a better set of circumstances. It is a different pattern.
What is the difference between knowing your pattern and being able to change it?
Knowing a pattern is cognitive. Changing it requires interrupting it at the level where it runs. Antano Solar John has worked with people who can describe their pattern with precision, trace its history, identify its triggers, and predict exactly what it will produce next, and still cannot stop it from running. Awareness and interruption are different capabilities. One informs. The other changes what you actually do.
How did Kodak's pattern lead to its collapse even though the company had highly talented people?
The talent was real. The pattern was the problem. Kodak ran a pattern loop that kept the organization inside its operational model while the photography market reorganized around digital cameras. The loop was self-reinforcing: priorities justified time allocation, time allocation produced deliverables, deliverables kept everyone too busy to question the priorities. Highly talented people inside a pattern loop produce the output of the loop, not the output of their talent.
What does it mean to change perceptual positions, and why does it matter for changing your life?
Changing perceptual positions means genuinely taking on another person's logic and emotional state, not imagining their perspective from inside your own. When you evaluate a situation only from your own identity, you are constrained by the assumptions, emotional states, and logic built into that identity. Antano Solar John and Harini deliberately evaluate business decisions from multiple identities, asking what specific people would see and do. This expands what is visible beyond what your current pattern allows you to see.
Why does the speed of pattern change matter?
Speed determines whether you can run experiments. If changing a pattern takes ten years and the change does not produce what you need, you have lost ten years with no ability to adjust. Fast pattern interruption means short feedback loops. You install a new pattern, observe how your circumstances respond, and adjust. This is how you find what actually works for your specific situation rather than persisting with an approach that is producing the wrong output.
The full session, in text
Read the full transcriptFor readers and search engines
You never know where you're heading towards. You know, Kodak, for instance, is like a huge multinational company, billion dollars in revenue, and overnight it's come down to a crash. And nobody even buys anything from that company anymore. It doesn't even exist. And businesses are all the time crashing and growing. There are so many couples who are so happily married, and suddenly one of the partner comes and says, I want a divorce. And it's a shock because the person might have thought that this is a perfect marriage. And I think one of the ways to inoculate yourself from that is to open your eyes and ears, to look for new opportunities. Because sometimes not going after an opportunity could be a mistake. You know, like if you don't grow, if you don't expand, then chances are somebody else is going to wipe you off. That's what happened in Kodak. Like, they didn't go to the digital camera when the whole world was operating over there. They were closed within their operational model. Now, you're not talking about idiots over here. You're talking about highly talented people who grew a multi-billion dollar empire. Now, if they could do that, many people could. The challenge is a lot of times we are boxed in a time and money cycle. Like we have certain priorities, certain deliverables, certain time requirements from us. And there is a pattern. There's a loop going on and on and on and on and on and on. I think just the same way that as people who are evolving excellence for others, the same way we are able to interrupt someone's pattern and help them go in a different direction, I think one of the superior capability people need to develop is to interrupt their own patterns. And to be able to step back, look at it, and then look at where this is heading in two years, three years, ten years, across all aspects of their life. For example, divorces don't happen because one of the spouse cheated on the other. Divorces happen because one of them stopped giving time to the other. And then it slowly starts building up. But then both of them are caught in such a vicious cycle that they wouldn't be able to notice that something is not going as well as it should be. And if they're able to notice, they would be able to step back and interrupt the pattern. And a lot of time I've also seen people who notice what is going on, but they don't have the power to interrupt their own patterns in their life. So I think the ability to pause, to step back, to become a different human being, and to evaluate it as different personalities. One of the things we do for our own business is every time we expand, every time we take up a new opportunity, we evaluate it as different persons. We have 20 consultants. And sometimes we ask the question, what would X do? What would Y do? What would Z say? And that's not because we don't know enough of our business. It's because we want to evaluate it from all possibilities and not just being who we are. And I think it's a superior capability to be able to step outside of your shoe and then step into other people's shoe and see what is going on. So I think if you have these two capabilities, the ability to become someone else on demand. A lot of times you meet people and you don't understand why a deal isn't closing with them. And I've met people like that, either because they want to become a director or they are going after a very big deal. And then they don't understand why they're not getting that. And what I do is I go through a comprehensive process where I help them shift their identity momentarily to become the other person. Now it sounds very easy to put yourself in the other person's shoes. But when many people try to do that, what they're really doing is they're trying to put themselves in the other person's shoes, but they're still thinking from their own logic, from their own emotional states. But to really put yourself in the other person's shoes is to take on that person's logic and to take on that person's emotions. And children can do this very easily. You've seen them play games like they become the parent and then they exaggerate the movements. But as they grow up, a human seems to lose the ability to do that. But I think if you could learn again to be able to change perceptual positions, become another person on demand, then I think you develop the ability to look at things holistically from every angle. And if you combine that with your capability to interrupt patterns and to change them, a lot of times you also need to do trial and error. If something isn't working, what you do is like a relationship is going down the drain, then what you do is you interrupt whatever pattern is going on and try a new pattern. And then if that doesn't work, you try another pattern. Because a lot of times the answers are not fixed. The answers are not written and your situation is very unique. So you need the ability to experiment, but you can't experiment if you don't have the speed. If it's going to take 10 years for you to change a pattern and if it doesn't work, then you've lost 10 years. So I think the ability to quickly interrupt patterns and to quickly bring about change in interactions and relationships gives you the power and ability to validate what is working for you and what is taking your life and your family in the right direction.
Before You Go
The article names the pattern. The masterclass changes it.
