Several months back, while leaving a concert — Alabama Shakes, great show — my friends and I got caught up in a bottleneck. One of our friends, Jeff, deftly herded us away from the middle of the crowd and out of the congestion by finding a seemingly invisible slipstream — a maneuver he explained with a simple quip: “You just gotta go where the water’s fast.”
That phrase — go where the water’s fast — was still crackling in my head a few days later when I realized that it perfectly encapsulates a concept from Taoism, one I’d come across but always had trouble internalizing. It’s called “wu wei” and best translates to “effortless action” or “non-action.” It’s something I’ve seen referred to by many a meditation teacher when they tell a student to “try not to try,” a semantic contradiction that always left me a bit perplexed: how does one try not to try?
“Go where the water’s fast” feels like the answer to that question. The idea isn’t to not take action but to not force an action — to do what’s most aligned with the natural flow of things.
For instance, maybe you’ve had one of those moments during your work day where you find a complete mismatch between the energy you have and the task that needs doing. Your to-do list says, “Write creative brief for next week’s ideas meeting,” and your brain is like, “Nah.” For me, that’s always the moment I’m most prone to distraction. If under no circumstances I’m going to be able to do the thing I need to do, well then why not watch the music video for every top-20 song from 1999?
In such a situation, “going where the water’s fast” would mean finding a different task that does match the energy I have. Maybe I’m tapped creatively, but can I set a timer for 25 minutes and start blasting through that email backlog I’d resolved to get done later today? The idea is to get out of the binary of “making the progress you expected to make” and “making no progress at all,” to get into the mindset of doing something rather than nothing.
The extent to which this is useful as a productivity device will largely depend on how much autonomy you have over your work schedule. For self-employed creatives, this is pretty much all work is: becoming a seasoned yachtsmen of the currents of your energy and focus, and learning to work with them rather than fight against them. For someone who’s stepping into an operating room, a courtroom, or a classroom, well, the bleeding patient or screaming six-year-old doesn’t really care if your energy matches their needs.
And look, I’ve been writing for over a decade now and there are simply times where I’m on deadline and I have to write regardless of my ~*fEeLiNgS*~ about it. Like any tool, the key with wu wei is knowing when and how to apply it.
On afternoons where I don’t have anything pressing and it’s too early to kick off but too late to start on the next big project, I try to locate another, less intense current I might slip into that will keep carrying me downstream and allow me to wring just a little more productivity out of the day. If I go down to the gym with a specific workout planned, only to realize there is no way I can get my self up for it mentally or physically, I scale down instead of giving up entirely. It allows me to keep from exhausting myself psychologically and physiologically, which allows me to stay consistent over days, weeks, and months.
To me, that’s the power of going where the water’s fast — and the art of trying not to try.
But this isn’t the only framework from spirituality that I’ve been finding useful lately. Below is one more…
Several podcast episodes ago, we discussed the incredible World Series performance of Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher — and eventual series MVP — Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who has taken an unconventional approach (doesn’t lift weights!) to become one of the best players in baseball. In preparing for that episode, I read a long ESPN story on Yamamoto and the biomechanist/coach he works with, named Yada Sensei.
One part of that story jumped out at me then and has stuck with me since:
In Osaka, Japan, sits a two-story building, about 1200 square feet that serves as the nerve center of Yada’s operation — ‘Japan’s No. 1 Spiritual + Physical Strength Shop,’ its website proudly states. The path to growth, the site says, is through tariki hongan (relying on other power) and jiriki hongan (self-reliance)."
Intrigued, I decided to look deeper into those two concepts, originally from Buddhism. Here’s what I found:
» Tariki Hongan: refers to “relying on other power” or “salvation through external power” — the emphasis is on faith, surrender, and the recognition that one’s own efforts are insufficient for liberation. This path acknowledges human limitations and the need for grace or compassion from a transcendent source.
» Jiriki Hongan: “self-power” or "salvation through one’s efforts” — personal discipline, meditation, and direct insight. This involves rigorous practice. Personal transformation through individual effort.
This seems to so perfectly map the formula for success in any domain. It requires rigorous, consistent work — and a whole hell of a lot of help from outside forces that aren’t in your control.
If you lean too heavily on either side of that equation — hoping that greatness might just swoop down and pay you a visit while you’re putting in no effort of your own, or, alternatively, believing that the only difference between a successful person and a failure is their #grindset, and has absolutely nothing to do with circumstance, structural advantage, or chance — sooner or later you’re going to collide with a hard reality that forces you to reconsider.
The best and most prolific writers talk about this a lot. They are rigorous about making writing a daily practice (jiriki hongan), even though on probably 90% of those days the writing sucks. Why? Because you never know when the good stuff — formerly “the muse;” now forever “tariki hongan” — is going to visit you, and you better damn well be near a writing device when it does.1 (I rue the many days tariki hongan has shown up to find me OOO.)
I find it’s true of running, too. When I am following a training plan, my job is to get out the door and try to execute the workout for that day (jiriki hongan). Whether or not it goes well is up to a whole host of factors, some of which I can control (what time I went to bed, how I fueled that morning, whether or not I drank 7 IPAs the night before) and so much of which I cannot (wind, humidity, cramps).
It’s a cliché, but, like most clichés, it’s true: I am not in the results business, I am in the showing up business. If I do my my part, it vastly increases the chances tariki hongan will do its part as well.
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In his book The Work of Art, where he talks to different artists about their creative process, Adam Moss includes a section with the poet Marie Howe, who articulates this well. “It takes a couple of days just thrashing through the brambles to get to any type of clearing, and it’s very painful,” she says of her best writing. “It’s frustrating, you see all your limitations, but a lot of what is happening is the unconscious is just waiting to see if you mean it.”
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