Why do small problems feel easy but big ones feel impossible?

You can clear a clog. You reach in, find what blocks it, pull it out, and the water moves again. You solved that without panic, because you could see the whole problem at once. The deeper drain is different only because you cannot see all of it. Bigger career problems — the politics, the systems, the things that took years to build up — feel like reaching your arm into a pipe with no visible end. So you freeze, and call the whole thing impossible. But no one clears a sewer by grabbing the whole length of it at once. They work joint by joint, from where they can see, toward where they cannot yet. The problem is not too big for you. You have only been trying to solve it in one motion instead of many.