I was sitting on the bus this morning on my way to a meeting and things were going smoothly. The bus came on time, it was clean and there was plenty of room to sit. Then, at some point, the bus came to a standstill. I was about five minutes driving time from where I was going, maybe ten minute's walk, and we weren't moving.
The problem was that the city where I live was not built for the amount of people that it has. Infrastructure is often ignored, but it's a crucial part of building out a city—more people means more pressure on roads, sewage, parks, schools, etc. You can't just build buildings and hope for the best. In any event, the problem soon became clear—there's a roundabout near a school that always backs up in the mornings. Too many people trying to move through one choke point and kids getting let off in the wrong place mean that traffic moves slowly.
Truthfully, all systems are like this. There are certain chokepoints, or bottlenecks, that limit the rate or effectiveness of the entire system.
In some systems, these are not functions of the system—they don't have to be this way—and therefore, with some careful consideration of the system, they can be overcome. In others, the bottleneck is simply part of the system itself, and is itself a built in limiter of the system.
One example of a built-in bottleneck is our biology. We have to eat, get a certain amount of sleep. These are rate-limiters on the human system that are non-negotiable (in fact, when people try to push past them, the system performance as a whole inevitably degrades). Another example of a fixed bottleneck is physics. These are constraints on the construction of the system and how it works—you can't fly (as an individual human) to where you want to go, or travel faster than a certain speed.
Other constraints are a matter of choice and can be changed. The way we respond to certain stimuli, for example, is a rate-limiter that need not be. We don't have to fall apart when confronted with certain things, or react angrily, or whatever. We need not stay in relationships that are damaging to us.
So back to our bus, sitting in a long line of traffic through the only traffic circle out of this part of the city. Does it need to be this way? Well, one could imagine building alternative routes out of the city, some that don't pass by schools (which are known to be creators of traffic). That would be changing the system itself. Alternatively, one could imagine changing one's behaviour in response to the system—leaving earlier or later, getting off and walking at a certain point before the traffic.
Many times in our lives, we encounter resistance to what we want to do and it's not at all clear where that resistance is coming from. Many of us simply assume that we're especially unlucky, or that other people are especially lucky. What we don't understand is that there are very few things out of our control, once we're willing to look honestly at the system.