How to succeed without trying

Keep quiet. Cultivate aloneness. Befriend uncertainty. Excise ambition. Don’t strive. Welcome what comes.

Love

Where conflict is, love is not. A man who is in conflict with himself, who is angry, fearful or jealous, cannot love.

Love is easy. Trying is failing.

No effort

Here, then, is the great challenge—to think when thought is required, not to think when thought is not required.

All that is required to meet the challenge is an understanding of it.

On the catwalk

You’ve been called in to help fix a dysfunctional workforce in a small manufacturing plant. The owner of the plant asks you to take a position on the catwalk so that you have a good view of how the workers perform their duties and interact with each other. At the end of the day, the owner checks in. You say: “Everything is fine. There is no problem.”

To settle the mind, observe the mind.

Notes on posture

Military posture is not good posture. Our spine is naturally curved, not ramrod straight.

The human head weighs fifteen pounds, give or take. It is supported by a complexity of ligament and bone. It rests, like a ball on a pole, on the uppermost point of the cervical spine.

When we consult a cellphone, the head falls forward. Repetitive slumping turns us C-shaped. The neck develops a compensatory musculature, a pronounced thickness extending from the base of the skull to the top of the back. We lose the ability to breathe diaphragmatically. Our internal organs are forced to function in an ever-diminishing space.

See how children walk, how regal they are. Good posture requires no effort. Old age is bad posture.