Are you’re constantly overlooked for a promotion that never comes? Do you grind away at the job you think you have to do instead of DOING the job you want to do? Do you think your work life will get better if your boss would just [insert any of the following]: notice, retire, relax, focus, get it together, give you some help, get fired?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, conventional wisdom says to push through and try harder, but that is probably the worst career advice you’ll ever get. When you’re in a career plateau — a place where hard work stops working – you are battling one of the most powerful forces of nature: The Plateau Effect. And you’re not alone. The Plateau Effect is woven into the fabric of the universe. It’s why we get diminishing returns for our efforts, but with some battle-tested techniques you can break free. We’ve spent the past few years mining the fields of behavioral psychology, mathematics, sports, leadership and even culinary arts to find out how some of the most successful people and companies in the world have gone from stuck to success. Call your frustration a plateau, and you are bound to come up with many more constructive solutions. Here are three:

1. Master the Art of Diversity: People, relationships, businesses and even physical processes become immune to the same techniques, the same approaches, the same solutions. Maybe your mastery of one skill, like delivering a killer PowerPoint presentation, got you where you are, but eventually any one skill tops out. Immunity is the most basic force of the Plateau Effect. If your career is in an immunity plateau we have good news: the path to getting unstuck is diversity. It might take you a lot of effort to move from an A-minus presenter to an A-plus presenter, but it requires far less effort to make big progress on a weaker skill. Try an improv comedy class to electrify your conversations with coworkers or clients. Take a career vacation and shadow a chef, or a realtor, or a winemaker for a day. You’ll think a little differently, bust through your immunity plateau and you might even find that a path outside of corporate America awaits.

2.  Learn to make Retrograde Progress: It’s tempting to go for the promotion that gives you a 5% raise or pushes you a notch up on the corporate ladder. But are you looking at the long-term picture? If that promotion comes with long hours, thankless tasks and requires your next boss to win the lottery and retire to make a move up, you need to take a breath before saying yes. You need to think about where your next career move is going to put you in five or 10 years—not one or two. The best short-term solution rarely leads to the best long-term outcome. If you find yourself always going for the quick win in your career you’re following what mathematicians call the Greedy Algorithm. Sometimes, the best way to get ahead is to take a step back and make something we call retrograde progress. Giving yourself permission to pass up a promotion or take a pay cut to go to a company with more opportunities for growth could be the best long-term career choice you’ve ever made. As they say on airplanes, sometimes the closest exit door is behind you.

3. Wield the power of the Just Noticeable Difference: Day to day, it’s difficult to tell if your life at work is getting better or worse. A situation can change slower than the threshold of perception that psychologists call the Just Noticeable Difference, or JND. The JND is why parents don’t realize how much their newborn has grown in a week until a friend comes over and says “I can’t believe how big she’s gotten!” To the friend, a week’s worth of growth came all at once. To the parents who see the baby every day, all that incremental hourly growth fell short of the JND. Are you happier at work now than you were a year ago or are you more frustrated? Keeping a journal about how you feel at work can help. If you recognize your current job is inescapably inching towards unhappiness, the worst career move you can make is investing the next ten years of your life there. By escaping the JND, you can objectively see how you’re progressing, figure out what’s working and what’s failing, then correct it or look for your next great adventure.

These are a few of the techniques that will help you get unstuck in your career, with one caveat: the trick that breaks you out of your plateau today will eventually stop working. That’s how the Plateau Effect works; eventually you’ll get stuck again. Success is a constant recalibration, breaking through one plateau at a time.