There is a pervasive myth in modern life that you can accomplish anything you want as long as you try hard enough. We are told that through your own willpower and determination, you can succeed where others fail and climb to the top of the ladder of success and power.
This myth has many ironies within it. Consider the perversion of the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps." This phrase was originally intended to highlight an absurdity—it is physically impossible to lift yourself off the ground by pulling on your own boots. It was meant to show how silly it is to consider doing anything entirely on one’s own, through sheer force.
So today, my goal is to talk to you about the alternative to this ineffective method of growth and self-betterment. The alternative is Rhythm.
I want you to picture two swimmers.
Imagine Swimmer A is thrashing, kicking violently, and creating massive splashes. They are exerting 100% of their effort, going full-out, hardcore, heart rate red-lining. And yet, when observed from the shore, they are not really moving that fast.
Now picture Swimmer B. They are almost silent. They are using long strokes, maintaining a steady motion and a consistency of movement. Swimmer B is using significantly less energy, but somehow, they end up going further, for longer, and faster than Swimmer A.
Why? Because they are working with the water instead of against it.
There is a famous swimming instructor named Terry Laughlin, the founder of the "Total Immersion" method. He taught that humans have an instinct that is woefully incorrect: an instinct to churn the water. We treat our lives much like we instinctually treat swimming. We are all trying to be Swimmer A. We believe that if we aren't suffering—if we aren't burning ourselves out—then we aren't on the road to success.
But we are incarnate beings in a physical world, and we can look to physics for a really important answer to this problem.
Physics tells us that drag increases with speed. The harder you push in a fluid medium like water, the harder that water is going to push back.
The same is true for the flow of life around us—unless we can enter into what the ancients might have called Wu Wei (but more on that in a moment).
Very frequently, we treat ourselves like machines. In fact, we are surrounded by machine metaphors. We have this idea that we can optimize ourselves to a point where we will efficiently run forever in a straight line. But that is not how the universe works. That is not how biology works. Frankly, that’s not even how machines work.
For human beings, the oscillatory nature of existence is built into us in a fundamental and non-extractable way.
Think of it this way: When you go out to exercise to improve your physical fitness, the way you build strength is through a combination of rest and stress. From stress, and then from rest, a period of growth emerges. The muscle actually doesn't grow while you are lifting the weight; it grows while you are sleeping after the lift. If you were to constantly stress yourself, you would simply snap the tendons in your body.
It is the oscillation—the sine wave experience of the rhythm of your existence—that actually leads to strength.
This biological reality actually mirrors an interesting philosophical concept from Germany called Aufheben.
Used by the philosopher Hegel, this word contains a very important contradiction. It means both to cancel or destroy AND to preserve or lift up.
From this duality, a new existence emerges. This synthesis is the understanding that, yes, you must work, stress, and strain to change the current state. And yet, you must also preserve, rest, and pull yourself back.
It is the synthesis of these two things that allows you to "lift up" to a new level. Something new emerges. This is why the modern concept of "The Grind"—constant, linear stress—is so incredibly unhelpful and dangerous.
Now, one of the other issues that comes with how we think about ourselves is the problem of the "Additive Trap."
When we feel slow or stuck—such as when we are swimming in the water and the current is pulling us back—our instinct is to add effort. We try to increase our energy output. We add more caffeine, we add more meetings, we try to fix our problems with more apps.
But as we already learned in hydrodynamics, adding power to a body that has high drag is only going to increase turbulence. It wastes energy. The same is true within the flow of life. To go faster, you need to remove friction.
There is an interesting quote that highlights this by the writer Nassim Taleb (author of Black Swan and Antifragile). He works off an old concept called Via Negativa (The Negative Way), but takes it into a lovely, applicable space for modern living. He says:
"Actions that remove are more robust than those that add."
So ask yourself: What can you remove? Are you seeking to solve your problems by doubling down with effort, gimmicks, tools, and tricks? Maybe what you need to actually achieve your goal is to let all that go and just do.
Earlier I talked about the philosophy of Wu Wei, the Chinese concept of the flow of life. This is really important for us, especially as we enter a new year, which so typically comes with unhealthy promises about all the new, good habits we are going to "add."
When we encounter an obstacle, the instinct is to crash through it. But think of what the incredible martial artist Bruce Lee said in an episode of Longstreet:
"Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Be water, my friend."
Instead of fighting the water that you are swimming in—instead of fighting the flow of life—you must be the water. This is the concept of Wu Wei, or effortless action. It is not laziness. It is not sitting back and nihilistically or apathetically accepting your fate; It is intelligent alignment with the universe. Water flows downhill not because it forces itself to, but because it surrenders to gravity.
When you try to control the uncontrollable, you are fighting the current. But when you adjust yourself to navigate the reality that you inhabit, you ride the current. You become the current.
The strongest swimmer isn't the one who fights the water the hardest, but the one who acts as if they were part of the water. The one who acts as if the water were their natural state and natural space of play.
Sometimes, however, you are so far over your head, so far out into the ocean, that you just don't know what to do. If you are stranded in deep water, you don't want to tread water. Treading water for any length of time is exhausting, and eventually, it will kill you. Pure strength will kill you.
The only way you survive when you are far out is to float.
This requires a relaxing of the muscles. It requires that you trust the physics of displacement to hold you up. That means letting go and becoming part of the water, part of the universe around you.
So here is my challenge for you for the year ahead:
Stop asking yourself to be stronger. You are likely strong enough already.
Instead, start asking yourself where your Rhythm is off.
- Where are you failing to enter the cycle of Aufheben?
- Where are you no longer oscillating between strength and rest, creation and destruction?
- Where are you failing to apply Via Negativa?
- Where are you adding to your life in ways that increase the drag?
Once you find those answers, dial back your attempt to force a successful conclusion to your goals. Let the small efforts made every day, for many weeks, turn into permanent change.
Let go of your conscious self.
Let go of the need to control yourself and the world around you.
Just breathe, and let the rhythm of the universe naturally buoy you up.