Introduction
Today’s post concludes our three-part article on why the quickest way to achieve your goal is often to abandon all your prior efforts to reach it. In this final section, we take a deeper dive into the epistemology of the issue, and explore just how widespread the applications are. For, as we’ll see, even on those occasions when you don’t necessarily have to stop trying in order to succeed at what you’ve been trying to do, still, achieving the optimum result in the shortest possible time, with least risk and fewest resources, more often than not means first abandoning your current efforts to get there.
—Ellen and James
Succeeding by Ceasing to Try—Part III
When Trying is Irrelevant at Best
In addition to the kinds of cases we surveyed last time, there are still other kinds of cases where, whether or not conscious effort gets actively in the way as in the examples we’ve sketched, conscious effort is, nonetheless, simply—at best—beside the point.
Perhaps by trying I can learn, eventually, to waggle my ears. Well-brought-up young ladies would once have learned to swoon at will. And yogis can train themselves to control all kinds of bodily variables and so walk on hot coals and so on.
But it is doubtful whether I or anyone could ever learn by conscious effort to have a sudden inspiration at will, or a mystical experience, or to attain Nirvana-like inner tranquillity, however much I may be able, up to a point, to create more favourable conditions for such achievements, say through reading inspiring works, practicing meditation, prayer or what have you.
It is here that the specifically religious variants of the reversal of effort come into play—the message is, “Wait! Stop! You can’t get there from here.” If the desired state is one of egoless self-abandonment to God’s will or immersion in the Tao, any assertion of one’s wilful efforts will nullify the result or at least be to no avail, be beside the point: distractions at best, self-defeating at worst (because “self”-reinforcing).
As Bernard Malamud said, “If you are on the wrong track, every station you come to will be the wrong station.”
Not only may conscious effort to achieve the sought-after state of selflessness directly short-circuit itself by putting oneself in a so-called “Be spontaneous!” paradox,1 but meanwhile, those efforts may blind one to, and direct energies and time away from, other, more promising possibilities. And now we are, with this last hint, beginning to see the beginnings of a possible way forward to removing the deceptive air of mystery and paradox.
The Nature of Effort
Before we can pursue it, however, we must pause for a bit of more technical philosophical analysis. For up until now we have deliberately bracketed-off and left unanalyzed and unquestioned the key notions of effort, of trying. The time has come, in our initial explorations, to start unpacking this a bit.
What is this “trying” or “making an effort” we keep talking about? To cut to the chase: “Trying” is not some special internal state of tightening one’s will into a sprung ball of elastic or exerting special mental force, a ghostly version of “elbow grease,” or a kind of mental torque. If I asked you simply to “try” you would want to know, “to do what?” If I said, “not anything in particular, just try! I’ll give you something to apply the trying to in a moment,” you’d begin to wonder about me!
If instead I asked you to “try and get the waiter’s attention” or to “try to lighten the mood,” you’d know roughly what sorts of things you’d need to do to constitute trying in these instances—catching the waiter’s eye and waving or clicking your fingers in the first instance, perhaps cracking a joke or telling an amusing story or, say, initiating a guessing-game in the second.
But if I asked you to try and raise all of the hairs on your head on end (without applying hair gel!)2 you would not know how to try, because while you know full well what would count as succeeding, you would have no idea what would count as trying, what sorts of things you should do. You know no means to such an end. It’s not like asking you to try and sing a high G3; you “know the sort of thing to do to approximate. Not so with the hair.”4
Just because “trying” or “making an effort” are in the active verb form, this does not mean that they refer to doings, or indeed to events or processes of any kind. The man trying to get his vintage car started is not doing something else besides doing all the things he’s doing in order to get it to start—turning the key, letting out the choke, depressing the gas pedal, checking the spark plugs, cleaning the carburetor jets—these are the very actions that, in this case, constitute the trying.
Trying is not some inner, ghostly, auxiliary accompaniment to all these specific actions: checking the spark plugs or letting out the choke, from the perspective of queries about what he has or hasn’t yet tried and how sedulously he is exhausting such mechanical possibilities, what means to the end may have been overlooked and so on, are precisely what constitute his trying in this context. Consider the following verbs5:
hurry, hesitate, persevere, obey, disobey, take care, attend, rehearse, play, pretend, enjoy, accelerate, cooperate, experiment, succeed, fail, abstain, bungle, recur, shirk. The common feature for which I select them is this: there is and can be no such thing as, for example, just obeying per se or just accelerating per se. Something positive or concrete must be being done for taking care, rehearsing or cooperating to be done.
And so with trying. If you exhort me to “try, try again,” or to “try harder” you will expect me to do more of what I am already doing to reach the goal, or perhaps to do something else that would achieve the objective.
If you upbraid me for not trying hard enough to get hold of the Principal, you might expect me to knock louder at his door, or phone at more frequent intervals, or leave a more urgent-sounding message, or send an email or text, or a telegram to Singapore or a messenger with a cleft stick—depending on the context and what expedients I have or have not already deployed. The deployable expedients of course will differ from case to case.
And so to return to our venerable paradox: We have surveyed a number of more obvious sorts of cases—ketchup bottle, centipede, pink elephant, soufflé, digital clock, “Be spontaneous!”, instant inspiration, and DIY Amazing Grace-type cases—where anything counting as trying will either be laughably irrelevant to, or actively inhibit or even preclude the attainment of the goal. But since trying on any occasion will always necessarily, as a matter of logical grammar, take the substantive form of deploying particular expedients, there will likely be a far wider range of cases to be considered in which the trialled expedients—themselves constituting the trying—are ill-chosen and ill-suited to the task.
A Solution Masquerading As a Problem6
In Elbert Hubbard’s immortal phrase, “Life is just one damn thing after another,” but when it’s the same damn thing over and over again, whatever expedients we deploy, we have on our hands what we might call “a problem.”7
The problem includes at least what it is we are trying to achieve—our desired ends, how we have framed or construed it, including our assessment of what is involved and what we think it will take to solve it, what we are doing in the effort to solve it (the trying part), what happens in response when we deploy those expedients, how we read and account for their failure and assess the implications for our next move, and so on.
You might say, while a problem with a ready and wholly workable solution is not (any longer) a problem at all but just a clear way forward, a problem without a solution is just a blind alley, a failed attempt to proceed a certain way. That’s what makes it problematic—our selected expedients are unfit for or unequal to the task. They don’t work.
A problem is, if you like, a would-be solution that’s not working—a favoured solution masquerading as a problem. Typically, insofar as we have come to construe the situation in a certain way and so deal with it accordingly, unless the failure of our efforts to date leads us to construe it differently we will persist in dealing with it inappropriately, ineffectively: the more we fail the more we will continue to try in ineffective ways. The MRI researchers Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch famously dubbed an enormous sub-class of such cases, cases of “more-of-the-same.”8
Even when we think we are trying something completely different, it is just the latest variation on an unchanged theme—another expedient from the same, inappropriate class of expedients. “I can’t open the door.” “What have you tried?” (You know the answer that’s coming already: ) “EVERYTHING.” “Specifically?” “I’ve tried pushing, I’ve tried pulling. I’ve kicked it, rushed at it with a battering ram. Everything.” “Wait, you’ve tried applying force. What have you tried besides applying force to it?” “Huh?” “Well, have you tried turning the handle, getting a key from the Lodge, ringing the bell, …?” You get the picture. Never mind that the occupant was deaf or that the other door was wide open.
Every substantive action constituting the “trying” was from a narrowly defined class of useless expedients. As the MRI folks put it, the solution soon (and more often than not) becomes the problem. It is the problem. To quote an old Nato training manual again, just because it is humanly possible to push a pea up the side of a mountain with your nose does not mean this endeavour is worth making or that it is the optimal way to your goal.
Sometimes doing more of what we have already been doing, or doing it more consistently or at higher volume or what have you, gets us the results we were after, and such cases, again, go unnoticed. In a wide range of other cases, however, our attempted solution is the problem—we are failing, in relative terms at least, on account of the ill-chosen expedients we have been deploying in pursuit of the desired end, and not in spite of them.
What constitutes our trying—and all that we can, on our limited construal or misconstrual of the situation currently conceive of as possibly constituting our trying (the more-of-the-same)—is precisely what has so far been guaranteeing our failure. The one thing we must stop doing if we are to succeed is whatever we currently regard as “trying.”
Why it’s Best to Stop Trying to When Your Trying is Not Working
The advice, “If at first you don’t succeed, stop trying,” can be unpacked and parsed as, “If at first you don’t succeed (or soon after), stop trying and do something different. If you can’t find anything sufficiently different to do, suspend all efforts, and come at it fresh later, because everything you have been trying has only reinforced an unhelpful way of construing the situation. You need to construe it differently if you are to make any progress.” Whatever you may think of such advice, there at least does not appear to be anything in the least paradoxical about it, or mysterious if it should lead to success.
Watzlawick et al.9 define “reframing” a situation as “chang[ing] a conceptual and/or emotional setting or viewpoint in relation to which a situation is experienced and [placing] it in another frame which fits the ‘facts’ of the same concrete situation equally well or even better, and thereby changes its entire meaning.” (p. 95)
There is, after all, no such thing, objectively speaking, as ‘the situation’—it is how I happen to situate myself, in the course of acting or preparing to act. My situation comprises my best take on what is salient in figuring out what to do and whether (and why) to do one thing (try one way) rather than another.
The “situation” is merely a proposal, explicit or implicit, to consider matters, construe matters a particular way. But the map is not the territory, and the possibilities abstracted in my one map never exhaust the possibilities potentially available. The situation may include certain givens, but is never itself a given.
No matter how sedulous our efforts, we may be “trying” along the wrong descriptive dimensions altogether. We construe our own actions, including the situations in which we take ourselves to be acting, in terms of a limited set of abstractions. These provide the descriptive dimensions or parameters of our actions on which, in acting, we seek to adjust our actions in relation to the context, including what we take to be the observed effects of our actions. And yet our actions can and do have significant effects well outside the confines of what is covered by those abstractions.
Sometimes, perhaps often, as the old song has it, “ ’tain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it—that’s what gets results.”10 And those adverbial aspects of what might otherwise be a fine approach may be just what we have been disregarding at our peril and precisely where we have been going wrong—that is, it may involve descriptive dimensions of our action we have hitherto disregarded but which will prove key to our success.
An otherwise resourceful employee who found himself constantly at loggerheads with his boss, suddenly found his views eagerly welcomed and valued and became his boss’s highly regarded protégé the moment he stopped addressing her the way he would address a valued customer and started approaching her instead the way he would approach an all-powerful superior, which his high-ranking boss indeed was. Previously, he had not included the ‘status’ dimensions of his non-verbal behaviour in his own descriptions of his endeavours.
All his resourceful “trying” had so far been for nought because they had been along dimensions quite irrelevant to getting the relationship right, and it’s the relationship aspects which had got in his way. All his trying had only been rubbing-in the impression of “arrogance” and “insubordination” he had inadvertently been giving, and that impression was reinforced the harder he tried to impress. It wasn’t surprising—he had been a consultant before he was hired to go full-time as a member of staff reporting directly to the boss who had formerly been his client.
How Often Are Our Efforts the Chief Reason for Our Failure or Limited Success?
I said earlier I would return to the question of how widespread this phenomenon is: how much of the time are our very efforts the reason for our failure? Why do we not just naturally assume it is virtually all the time? If what you are doing isn’t working, surely this means you need to do something else.
For so far we have only considered the kinds of circumstances in which our efforts lead to outright failure or preclude any chance of even modest success. But failure and success are, often as not, in context, relative rather than absolute matters. I would commend to you, for your serious consideration, the proposal that even our most successful actions are relatively suboptimal compared to what they could be; that we succeed after a fashion, but could always find a better way to get there—more efficient, quicker, more effective, if only we abandoned what we fondly regarded as making the required efforts and confined ourselves to doing instead what is really required.
Our solutions are perhaps more often than not suboptimal and we create unnecessarily difficult problems for ourselves, with even our most workable solutions being, in relative terms, unnecessarily problematic. Bertrand Russell said somewhere that “fully nine-tenths of the world’s business is pointless lunacy in the cause of general employment,” and we may flatter ourselves that our own endeavours fall into the remaining one-tenth or that we even might know which were which.
My deep suspicion is that the paradox of intention only strikes us as paradoxical at all because of the deeply flawed, unquestioned presuppositions of our narrow, technical rationality. We tend unthinkingly, against all reason, to assign any given problem to the “appropriate” class of problems to which we assume it must naturally and necessarily belong, where each class of problems is the class of problems amenable to a given class of known generic solutions.
We name our complaints after our favourite nostrums. Now it has been said that if the only tool you have is a hammer you tend to regard everything as if it were a nail; but I would add that the real mischief is this: that the more tools you have in your toolbox the more this problem only tends to proliferate.
The “sovereignty of technique”—as Oakeshott called it in his critique of what he referred to as “rationalism” and what I am here calling “technical rationality”—represents, in essence, “the [tacit] assertion that technique and some material for it to work upon are all that matters.” (Rationalism in Politics, p. 2111)
Technical knowledge is generic, “susceptible of formulation in rules, principles, directions, maxims—comprehensively, in propositions. It is possible to write down technical knowledge in a book.” (p. 14) We derive (p. 118) our activity and its direction from principles lying outside that activity, regarding each activity as activity of a particular kind, defining in turn what we are doing and what is to count here as trying. All this seems to me to be a mistake, and the biggest single mistake it is possible to make.
If every situation, every problem, every theatre of action, is instead regarded as sui generis, entirely idiosyncratic, it is not clear in advance of analyzing the constraints and possibilities in all their local uniqueness, which general principles and what kinds of tools it is relevant to try and bring to bear.
It is not obvious, in other words, what really ought to constitute our trying. And often we get it wrong before we get it right—and it is invariably what we have pre-selected or presupposed as the relevant “trying” or “effort” that needs to be abandoned, replaced and sometimes apparently directly reversed. What is needed, often as not, is not greater persistence, Thomas Palmer to the contrary, but a redirection of our endeavours.
If our tentative analysis thus far is on the right lines, then it is in the practical arena that the deleterious effects of our technical rationality are most pernicious of all. But then, I am personally less interested philosophically in the specifically spiritual issues, the so-called problems of life, beyond agreeing with the philosopher Jonathan Lear that the essence of the Western intellectual and cultural tradition, at least, is not technical rationality or political freedom or critique or belief in the individual, or what have you, but a conviction that the human soul is far too deep for there ever to be any simple answer to the question of how one should live.
But if we turn to the application of our venerable paradox to questions of a spiritual nature, questions of how to live, we can see a clear pattern to virtually all of its appearances in all the world’s creeds and philosophies where it is to be found.
As Shaw shows in his book, the consistent theme is that “we suffer from an excess of technique” (p. 206, the last seven words of his book) and that the seeker after salvation or enlightenment must turn her attention from ways of doing to a way of being, where the peculiarly human way of being in harmony with “life, the universe and everything” is (roughly) an effortless, selfless, harmonious responsiveness to what is, here and now.12
Shaw writes:
Life is embedded in a larger sustaining whole, and yieldedness to this, participation with it, is the fulfilment of human existence. …Our trust should be in the experienced buoyancy of the water and not in any belief about why it must be so, or that no one ever drowns. (p. 202)
I will leave and commend to you Shaw’s own, more detailed and documented synthesis of what James called the fundamental religious act, and remind you that there is no one way, according to most of these traditions, in which such a yielding, effortless, context-responsive, harmonious way of living one’s life is to be lived. “My Father’s house has many mansions.” It can take limitless individual forms, as various as the unique individuals who live it, and likewise can be achieved in no single way.
There are close resonances between this Marvin Shavian account of the fulfilled life and Oakeshott’s own detailed analysis of what is properly regarded—and he argues, has always been regarded—as true rationality as distinct from the narrowness of rationalism—the anorectic, technical rationality which has been passed down to us in a particularly extreme form since the so-called Enlightenment13 of the 18th Century.
An intelligent, harmonious responsiveness to idiosyncratic local context is what Oakeshott is talking about. And on such a view of rationality, there is nothing irrational, nothing paradoxical, about abandoning any of our efforts in their present form upon encountering an insurmountable obstacle, and, instead, taking a different tack.
© Copyright 2004, 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Paul Watzlawick, The Situation Is Hopeless, But Not Serious: The Pursuit of Unhappiness; New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1983
Justin Gosling Weakness of the Will, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 168
op. cit., p. 168
ibid.
Gilbert Ryle, On Thinking, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979, p. 17
I am pretty sure I originally owed this phrase to my Interchange colleague, Alan Engelstad—but I’ve been using it so long I cannot be certain.
as John Weakland had it
Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution; New York, W. W. Norton, 1974
op. cit.
From the old jazz standard, “’Tain't What You Do (It's the Way That You Do It)” by Sy Oliver and Trummy Young, first recorded in 1939 by Jimmie Lunceford, Harry James, and Ella Fitzgerald.
London: Methuen & Co, 1962
This is closely related to the notion of haecceity or thisness of the Scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus (1265–1308), and the notion of inscape derived from it by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)—roughly, the inalienable, unique individuality of anything, to which we are to respond in a way that transcends all pre-conceived categories or abstractions. This is a theme central to the new epistemology and to our approach to change, and a topic to which we shall return in later posts.
at least outside the Germanies—but this is a very large and not-uncontroversial topic in intellectual history, and an important one in my view