You Want to Be Successful in Life?

You Better Not Try.

An ancient Chinese philosophy explains why we give our best sometimes to no success when other times life lies at our feet without us lifting a finger.

I’m German, and as such, I have words for things that you might only have a set of fuzzy feelings for. Like longing for a place I don’t know of, just not the one where I am: Fernweh. When that woman who blocked the escalator later stumbles over her heels, and I experience sweet pleasure: Schadenfreude. Or when Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye makes a dash for freedom oozing down his face, and I’m embarrassed for him but also for me and potentially everyone leaking goo in public: Fremdschämen (and Schadenfreude). One word and a complex emotion with many different factors at play are easily understood. Having a name for something makes understanding this world and our intentions in it easier.

But the Germans don’t have a word for everything. Say, you’re looking particularly cute today, and you know it and head out looking around for someone to notice — but nothing, not even a side-eye. And then another day, you’re in line for coffee in your sweats with yesterday’s hair and a gaggle of thoughts cruising through your mind, and suddenly you’re turning heads. Germans can’t help wrapping up this quandary in a comprehensible concept. But ancient Chinese thinkers could: wu-wei. It explains why we give our best sometimes to no success at all when other times life lies at our feet without us even lifting a finger. Wu-wei is that effortless confidence of being in the world with an unselfconscious spontaneity. It gets you everywhere you want in life without even trying. In fact, precisely because of not trying.

Edward Slingerland is a Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia in Canada and an internationally renowned expert in the cross-disciplinary research of Chinese studies and cognitive science. He is the author of “Trying Not To Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity.” I called him, attempting to figure out how we can try to try less and use our conscious mind to shut down our conscious mind.

Spoiler alert: wu-wei is a challenging paradox to wrap your head around. Don’t try too hard.

Slingerland compares it to tennis: “Some time ago I really wanted to beat my friend at tennis. I’m usually not that competitive, but I had just picked it up again and started to get better. There came this moment in the game when I realized: Wait, I could actually win this. And then I wanted to! That’s the point when a lot of people start to think and choke. Tennis is a great laboratory for the paradox of wu-wei because you can’t enforce a good game. The swings you use in tennis actually require you to relax. So I found myself shanking shots into the net until I realized that I was using my brain too much. I wasn’t inhabiting the moment properly. I needed to stop wanting.”

Not wanting. That shouldn’t be a problem at all, right?

This is how he made it work: “I tried to make my mind empty and relax. We were playing down at the beach, so I started to think about the ocean and kayaking. I distracted myself, and that allowed me to relax and get back into just playing the game.”

He won.

Wu-wei is all about focussing in a diffuse way. It translates as effortless action — a dynamic and unselfconscious state of mind. Literally, it means “no doing” or “no trying,” although it’s by no means inaction. It just feels like doing nothing. You’re not exerting cognitive effort; there’s no striving of any kind. Everything just falls into the exact right place — wu-wei is the key to success.

You’re not helping the shoots grow by pulling them upward. — Chinese proverb

As soon as you reason about your goals and consciously push to reach them, they might get spoiled by your enthusiasm. Rather than taking action motivated by goals, desires, and conscious thoughts, you should only be inspired by the task in front of you. You should let the world move around you rather than trying to impose your will on it. Athletes often talk about this state as being “in the zone”, and wu-wei is also similar to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow state. Albeit, flow focuses more on the challenge and complexity of an activity.

“In many situations, there has to be some kind of preparatory training before you can get into wu-wei,” says Slingerland. “You need what I call cultivated thoughtlessness. I can’t just sit at the piano and start soloing. It would sound ridiculous. But my brother-in-law is a classically trained pianist, and he can pound out whatever he feels like, and it sounds good. He can play Bach and do weird things with it, altering it or playing a solo on top of it — all kinds of crazy stuff, and it sounds cool. That’s because he masters the piano well enough to lose himself in wu-wei.”

However, this only works if he doesn’t want to play well while he’s playing. That’s the paradox: While we might want to achieve something, we don’t want to want it because we can only get what we want if we don’t want it.

But how do I make myself not want something that I want?

“It depends on how you want it,” says Slingerland. “You can absolutely have a goal. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have a direction in what you’re doing. But to be successful, you have to let the goal fade into the background while you’re doing the thing you want to be doing.”

Here’s how to not do it, with a real-life example from Slingerland, being single and trying not to be: “In grad school, I’d go to this café to work on my dissertation. There were times when I was sort of working but really checking out women. I was sure that they’d be fascinated by my ancient Chinese books and start a conversation. But because it was what I wanted to happen, it didn’t. The problem was I was kicking off signals that I wasn’t really absorbed in my work. Every time a woman came into the café, I looked up, making too much eye contact. People are really good at picking up these small signs we give off.”

He must have learned something from his books, as later in his life, Slingerland got luckier: “I really like wine and went to these wine classes. I quickly discovered that 90% of the attendees were there to meet somebody. They had this energy, were dressed very nicely, there to impress. And they weren’t meeting anyone. On the other hand, I became the social magnet because I was really into the class and just enjoying the wine. If I had gone thinking I was gonna meet people, I wouldn’t have had this confidence that made me attractive. You can’t do this as a conscious strategy. It’s gotta be something that comes from inside and emanates from you.”

Wu-wei makes people highly attractive. It’s irresistible

So if you’re at a party, and you’re dying to meet someone, by all means, forget all about the needs of your lonely heart. You went to the party, that’s the direction. Now relax. Of course, the more you think about relaxing, the more you tighten up. But you want that radiance of people in wu-wei that makes them highly attractive to others. It’s confidence without arrogance. It’s irresistible. “If you have it, people like you, trust you, and are relaxed around you,” says Slingerland.

But how do I get to a state of trying less, other than by trying to try less? How can I willingly want less? How am I relaxed at the party, if I’m not already?

“If there was an easy answer to that, we wouldn’t call it a paradox. We can’t get to a state of wu-wei through processing information. Instead, we need to practice skills to get there in an indirect pursuit. The early Chinese thinkers developed rituals, meditations, art, and much more to strengthen confidence and serenity.”

The question arises of what the old Chinese knew about the challenges of our time. Our lives are about competition in so many ways. We’d be insane to stop striving. Everyone else is doing it, after all. But oh no, says Slingerland, the ancient Chinese had the exact same problems. The philosophies he’s talking about stem from the Warring States period when states battled for power and the best technologies and ideas. As they were getting taken over left and right, there was a lot of pressure and competition, and people could really ascend the ladder if they tried and worked hard. It’s precisely for this reason that there was so much philosophical activity during that time. “The philosopher Zhuangzi wrote in the text known by his name about the problem with people: everyone’s fighting, trying to get anything that anybody else has. They think they know what they want and keep pushing and pushing, and the result is they just get older, lose their health and die. Doesn’t that sound a lot like our society today?”

So let’s check out four strategies to get to a state of wu-wei — derived from the works of Confucius, Laozi, Mencius, and Zhuangzi.

Let’s say I’m the president of a company with somewhat of a temper problem. I know how horrible I can be at times, and I wish my employees would like me a little better. What would Confucius do?

Slingerland: “He would recommend reading. There are many examples in the Analects of Confucius teaching us alternatives to angry behavior in the office. So this would be a great manual for our choleric boss. You see Confucius interacting with his disciples, who all have their particular problems and personalities. He properly handles each person: He’s blunt and direct to one disciple because that’s what he needs, and soft and indirect with criticism to another because that’s more helpful in his situation. These stories are like a training video, but the idea is not to consciously learn how to behave. It’s about observing a real master until you internalize his skills. Next time an employee doesn’t do what he’s supposed to do, you use your imagination, call up all those stories and embody that behavior in your current situation. By thinking about Confucius’ approach, you in a sense download it onto your automatic system so that it becomes second nature eventually.”

Don’t just end up pretending you’re Confucius

Laozi, however, the founder of philosophical Taoism, would go about it differently. He thought you’d never get out of the thinking process with the rigid Confucian approach. You’d just end up pretending you’re Confucius and acting in a way that’s not you. His strategy was to stop thinking altogether, leave the problem alone and go do something else. He’d probably advise the angry boss to stop being a manager and go live in a forest for some time. Obviously, he wouldn’t be particularly helpful in our case.

Someone like Zhuangzi admittedly would also ask to empty your mind — but only to allow this force inside of you to take over. According to his philosophy, our horrible boss is horrible because he tries to impose artificial frameworks on situations. He is reacting from conscious scripts that are inappropriate for the problem at hand. Instead, he should let his spontaneous tendencies take over. Zhuangzi believes that every human being has an internal guidance system that leads to success. You just have to stop overthinking things.

If you have problems trusting the inner good — couldn’t it be that our boss is just genuinely and spontaneously an asshole? — try Mencius. He’s in between the Taoists and the Confucians. “Mencius agreed we have this good nature, but it’s only a potential: a sprout that needs our help growing,” says Slingerland. “You do need to make some effort, that’s where he’s Confucian. But you don’t want to try too hard. Just be open to training and guiding from books and teachers and build on your potential.”

Why the paradox of wu-wei lets us trust each other

Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, and Zhuangzi can help us enter a state of inner ease, making it possible to approach our goals without pushing for them directly. And as it turns out, all this wu-wei might be a natural consequence of how modern civilization evolved. Especially in large-scale societies, we face the problem that we need to cooperate with strangers. The only way this can work is to feel like we all share the same values and are part of the same crowd. The danger that comes with that is that people could be faking it. So human beings have become highly sensitive to signs of sincerity. We become suspicious of the slightest clue of conscious effort in social situations because conscious effort is associated with cheating and lying. If someone is trying hard to be liked, he must be up to something, right? A spontaneous reaction is usually cooperative and follows a set of shared values. There is much experimental evidence for that, as Slingerland presents in his book. Cheating happens when you give people time to think.

Spontaneous people are trustworthy because spontaneity is hard to fake — like a sincere smile. It’s controlled by muscles that are not under our conscious command. If everyone could just flip on spontaneity like a light switch, we wouldn’t be so attracted to confidence and relaxed attitudes. It’s the paradox that lets us trust each other.

I shouldn’t try to find a useful conclusion to this article. For the moment, it should be enough just to know about the paradox of wu-wei. The word can help us recognize situations in which we are giving our best, it’s not successful, and we don’t know why. “Wu-wei!” we’ll think, and become aware that maybe we’re trying to impress a little too eagerly, thirsting for tennis scores a little too desperately, or brooding a little too eternally over that good last sentence, when all that’s left to do is hit Publish.