change adaptation

It's best to take a dichotomous approach. Master the rules and pursue your passion at the same time. Acceptance is important and so is adaptation. 

Adaptation begins with acceptance. When you accept what you are given, you get what you want. It's a strange kind of alchemy whereby accepting the loss of what you want leads you to what you want. A similar thing happens with goals. For some reason, it's often when you stop trying to achieve a goal that it just happens.

Maybe wanting something too badly drives it away and trying too hard to avoid something attracts that thing. Like with anxiety and fear, if you try to resist them and hate them and don't accept them, it gives them power over you. With worry, if you try to resolve it or reassure yourself - if you argue with it - your thoughts go round and round, over and over the same unresolvable question, wearing a deeper and deeper groove until it's so deep that, whatever you think about, your thoughts always end up flowing down into that groove. The problem is not the thing you're worried about, the problem has become the worry itself. So you start worrying about worrying, which is worse than worrying about some real situation or eventuality, because it fuels itself. If you worry about worrying, the more you worry, the more you have to worry about. So, it escalates. Anxiety is like that too. 

My two biggest maladjustments are catastrophising and rumination. But I've been learning some solutions - some strategies that really work against these and other cognitive distortions. The solution to catastrophising is to recognise when I'm doing it, because then I know it's not true. It's an error in my thinking. The solution to rumination is action - doing stuff. When you're in a mental hole, it seems impossible to be active - to achieve the goals you have for each day. So you don't. But then it gets to a point where it's a matter of life and death. You know that if you don't change, you don't have a future. So you start doing your daily goals as if they were a job. You're so far out of your comfort zone now anyway, and you discover that you can live and love and function regardless. Doing more and ruminating less changes everything.