Steven Bartlett has a Slack channel at his company called "paper walls". A paper wall looks solid until someone pushes on it. In a clip from The Diary of a CEO he tells the story of an animator who took nine days per video for four years. When Bartlett finally asked why, the answer was an old laptop.
Most limits I have run into were not laptops. They were rules. Three from the last couple of years:
"The survey is mandatory." An authority selected us to file two recurring statistical surveys. The templates did not even open on a Mac, and the only help on offer was a later deadline. I asked for an exemption instead. Five days later we had one, for both surveys.
"Our clients expect you onsite in Belgium every week." A consultancy marketplace paused our onboarding for that reason. I did not argue by email. I asked for a call. We were onboarded, and through that same platform we later won a fully remote contract with a client.
"That's not possible, and there are no refunds." Our hosting provider's support said a firewall feature did not work on our server and offered a manual workaround. Their policy said no refunds once a server is provisioned. I said the workaround would not work for us and asked for our money back. Within a day, one of their own specialists confirmed the feature did work, and the refund was approved.
None of these took cleverness. They took one question nobody had asked yet: is this actually a rule, or just the way it is usually done?
Most walls are not brick. You only find out by pushing.