Hey guys, it's Non here.
Twelve hours stuck in an airport taught me something that years of trying harder never did. Effort spent on the part of a system you do not control looks exactly like effort. And it produces exactly nothing. I learned that the hard way, in a plastic chair, at three in the morning.
Here is how it happened, and every detail of this is real.
My employer bought me plane tickets. Somewhere inside those tickets was a twelve-hour layover in Kiev. It had been confirmed with the travel agent before anyone thought to ask me.
I found out when it was already happening.
And I want to be honest, the way I was honest when I wrote it down at the time. I probably would not have minded, if somebody had told me. But nobody told me. So I was caught off guard, with no visa to leave the airport and see the city.
Which meant the terminal was the whole world. Badly ventilated, no sunlight, one lounge, and me.
Now stop the story there and look at the shape of that situation. Because you have been in it, even if you have never seen Kiev.
The flight leaves when it leaves. No amount of pacing changes the departure board. No amount of being furious with your employer rebooks the ticket. Every lever that matters is on the other side of a wall you cannot reach through.
And what do we all do in that room? We push on the wall.
We refresh the board. We compose the angry message we will not send. We perform effort at a system that cannot receive it.
Here is the trap. Pushing on the wall feels identical to working.
Your heart rate says you are doing something. Your exhaustion at the end of the day testifies that you tried. But the wall registers nothing at all.
Effort applied to the part of a system you do not control is indistinguishable, from the inside, from real work. And it produces, on the outside, exactly nothing.
So what did I actually do with those twelve hours?
The first three, I slept. I was behind on sleep, and sleep was a lever that happened to be in the room with me.
From the fourth hour on, I read, and I wrote, and I listened to a new audiobook. It was Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning. I had just finished his Twelve Rules for Life.
And somewhere in that terminal the coincidence became a game. Twelve rules. Twelve hours.
So I started writing one rule of my own for every hour that passed. Not his rules. Mine. Distilled out of my own life, while the departure board did whatever it wanted.
Let me give you a few, in the words I wrote back then.
Social proof is dangerous. We barely think when we are following what everyone else is already doing. So do not spend your time with selfish people, or you will be doing awful things before you notice.
Be kind, not right. We never know everything we would need to know to make a truly correct judgment. So be kind, and cut everyone's ignorance, including your own, some very big slack.
Do not confuse what you want with what other people want you to want. Somebody getting ahead of you is not a reason to speed up. It is certainly not a reason to leave your own path and race on theirs.
And the one I still quote at people. Success needs determination and luck. Forty-nine percent determination, fifty-one percent luck.
But you need the determination first. Without it you will not recognise the luck when it arrives. You will just be busy blaming somebody.
Now notice what happened in that terminal.
Twelve hours I could not shorten by one minute became one of the more productive half-days of that year. Not because I am disciplined. Because the situation deleted every option except the useful ones.
The wall took away the illusion that pushing on walls counts.
Years later I found out this lesson has a name. And it is two and a half thousand years old.
A professor at the University of British Columbia wrote the book on it. His name is Edward Slingerland, and he is one of the world's experts on ancient Chinese thought and modern cognitive science. The book is called Trying Not to Try.
I did not go looking for it, which is the joke of this whole episode. I will come back to that.
The book is about wu wei, an old Daoist idea. The usual translation is non-action, which sounds like an instruction to become a couch.
It is not. It is the observation that the best action is often the one that stops interfering.
Lao Tzu puts it like this. The sage does not accumulate things. Yet the more he gives to others, the more he has himself.
The whole logic runs on letting go, not on holding on.
And before you file that under mysticism, notice what Slingerland is actually doing. He shows modern psychology arriving at the same place, carrying instruments.
Take the hot hand. A basketball player is in the zone, hitting everything, playing the best game of their life.
Then somebody reminds them to keep it up.
And they start missing. Unforced errors. The sports word for it is choking, and the mechanism is precise. The moment attention moves from the task to the outcome, from the shot to the scoreboard, performance collapses.
Trying your best, in the scoreboard sense, is the thing that broke the shooting.
The research stacks up the same way from every direction. We do our best work in flow, when the mind is clear, when we are doing the thing for the thing. And we do our worst when a reward is dangling in view.
The effect even has a name. What payment does to people who loved the work before you paid them is called motivation crowding.
The economist in me hates that finding. I say the opposite on stages myself — people run on incentives. And it is true, for getting people to show up.
But the last ten percent, the part where work becomes great? Rewards reliably poison that part. History is embarrassingly consistent about it.
You want the extreme case? Charles Bukowski.
A writer who fought his way up from nothing. The American Dream with a hangover. You would expect his tombstone to say he never gave up.
It says: don't try.
And the reading that convinced me is Mark Manson's. Bukowski's success never came from straining to become a winner. It came from total, unflinching honesty about what he already was. He wrote the worst parts of himself without hesitation. That honesty was the genius, not the trying.
Or take Woody Allen, who never shows up to collect his awards. Four Oscars, and he stays home.
His reason, from an interview in 1974, is worth hearing exactly. The whole concept of awards is silly. He cannot abide by the judgment of other people. Because if you accept it when they say you deserve an award, then you have to accept it when they say you don't.
Look at the structure of that sentence. It is the airport again.
The judgment of other people is the departure board. A display you do not control. Accept its authority when it flatters you, and you have signed a contract to obey it when it doesn't.
The only clean move is to stop pushing on that wall.
And here is the punchline I promised. How did I find Slingerland's book?
I was about to get on a fourteen-hour train to work. I needed something to read, and I was not trying hard to choose. An app reminded me the book had been sitting on my wish list for years, and was on sale.
That is the whole search.
Now suppose I had tried harder. Read the reviews, compared the authors, run a proper cost-benefit analysis like a good economist. I would have ended up with a different book. Probably the wrong one.
I did not try hard. So I could give Trying Not to Try a try.
The book about not forcing things arrived by not being forced. The universe occasionally has the decency to be on the nose.
Now the applied part, and you know my terms. I will help you, but you do the first rep yourself. Tonight, not someday.
Take the thing that is currently eating you. The stalled project. The silent reply. The decision sitting in somebody else's office.
Draw a line down a page. On the left, the parts you actually control. On the right, the parts you do not.
Be brutal about the sorting. Your ego will try to smuggle right-side items over to the left by calling them influence.
The other person's answer is right side. The market is right side. The departure board is right side, always.
What is left on the left is usually small, and boring, and completely available. The email you can send. The skill you can practise. The three hours of sleep you are behind on.
Then here is the discipline, and it is the same one as last episode. Every worry is a sentence. The right-side worries are the sentences that have to be cut, no matter how loudly they scream.
Spend this week's effort on the left column only. Let the right column do what it was always going to do anyway.
It will. With total indifference to how hard you pushed on it.
Twelve hours in a plastic chair. And the flight left exactly when it was always going to leave.
The only thing my effort ever controlled was what I did in the chair. That turned out to be enough.
It always is.