Doing nothing, quite frequently, is the best decision. This may seem counterintuitive, especially in the age we live in today, the age of technology. Things are speeding up and getting faster. Doing nothing seems to be the perfect recipe for inevitable failure and becoming obsolete, or is it? Let us explore a few scenarios in which doing nothing creates favourable outcomes.
Examples of how doing nothing works in your favour:
- You’re stuck in traffic and you stay in the same lane instead of frantically trying to change lanes, only to find yourself in the slower lane.
- In football (soccer), you find yourself in an offside position. Instead of running back to be onside, you stay there. The defence line retreats, and suddenly you’re onside without moving at all.
- You exercise once or twice a week, and then you let your body recover instead of overworking yourself, which increases the chances of injury.
Examples of how doing too much works against you:
- You’re playing football, and you find yourself frantically running around the field, making runs non-stop, chasing the ball constantly, only to find yourself with no energy left after a couple of minutes.
- You force yourself to be ‘productive’, working day and night, 7 days a week, and you have no time to do anything else, to exercise, spend time with others, and do other things. As a result, you feel increasingly out of control and burnt out.
- Complaining that a plant is not growing fast enough, so you decide to pull it up by the roots to make it grow faster.
One is patient, calm, sharp, centered, peaceful, relaxed, mysterious, elusive, unpredictable, uncertain, flexible, and detached.
The other is impatient, frantic, panicked, rushed, forceful, blunt, obvious, clear, predictable, certain, rigid, attached, and agitated.
In the latter state, one is hyper focused on the outcome and the result, creating a form of extreme tunnel vision. Their entire worldview is constricted. It is akin to looking through a straw, frantically trying to find what you want, only to end in failure and disappointment. The problem is not the amount of effort exuded – it’s just really hard to find something when you’re looking through a straw.
Doing too much essentially comes from fear. Fear that we are not doing enough. Fear that we will become obsolete. But one of the things about fear is that the more we try to run away from it, the more we run towards it. And as such, it has been said that fear is mother of the event.
Something that I have found to be incredibly useful is to allocate at least one day a week to doing nothing. And the definition of ‘doing nothing’ is really up to you to decide. That could mean, for example, building your side hustle so that one day it will make you a million dollars. For just one day a week, you allow yourself to take a day off from whatever it is to rejuvenate, recover, and relax.
Jason wang 