Trying Not to Try Quotes

“Thinking that you are good can make you bad. Talking about positive behavior can encourage negative behavior. Laozi is clearly on to something when he warns us that consciously trying to be righteous will, in fact, turn us into insufferable hypocrites and that anyone striving to attain virtue is destined to fail.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Ancient Art of Effortlessness and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity

“If we have to translate it, wu-wei is probably best rendered as something like "effortless action" or spontaneous action.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity

“The conscious mind, ungrounded by the wisdom of the body, is remarkably incapable of taking care of business.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity

“Let alone, without the help of or hot cognition, cold cognition is simply paralyzed by choice.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity

“When people are asleep, their spirits wander off; when they are awake, their bodies are like an open door, so that everything they touch becomes an entanglement. Day after day they use their minds to stir up trouble; they become boastful, sneaky, secretive. They are consumed with anxiety over trivial matters but remain arrogantly oblivious to the things truly worth fearing. Their words fly from their mouths like crossbow bolts, so sure are they that they know right from wrong. They cling to their positions as though they had sworn an oath, so sure are they of victory. Their gradual decline is like autumn fading into winter—this is how they dwindle day by day. They drown in what they do—you cannot make them turn back. They begin to suffocate, as though sealed up in a box—this is how they decline into senility. And as their minds approach death, nothing can cause them to turn back toward the light.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Ancient Art of Effortlessness and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity

“This work is part of what is now a huge literature on the often harmful effects of rumination and explicit analysis on people’s ability to experience and identify pleasure.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Ancient Art of Effortlessness and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity

“People who are in wu-wei has de, typically translated as "virtue," "power," or "charismatic power." De is radiance that others can detect, and it serves as an outward signal that one is in wu-wei.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity

“faster in areas of our life where effort and striving are, in fact, profoundly counterproductive. This is because the problem of choking or freezing up extends”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Ancient Art of Effortlessness and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity

“Our excessive focus in the modern world on the power of conscious thought and the benefits of willpower and self-control causes us to overlook the pervasive importance of what might be called “body thinking”: tacit, fast, and semiautomatic behavior that flows from the unconscious with little or no conscious interference. The result is that we too often devote ourselves to pushing harder or moving faster in areas of our life where effort and striving are, in fact, profoundly counterproductive. This is because the problem of choking or freezing up extends far beyond sports or artistic performance.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity

“In another sense, however, contemporary secularism has new and distinct features, the source of both its strengths and its weaknesses. Its commitment to rationality and evidence, for instance, means that it’s unusually open to modification around the edges, although—as with any value system worth its salt—the core values like human rights or freedom are in principle non-negotiable. The flip side to this openness is a somewhat disorienting minimalism: liberalism is about as stripped down as a value system can be and still function. Most of its injunctions are negative. Do not violate human rights, do not restrict people’s freedom of expression, do not allow the strong to oppress the weak. As long as you are careful to steer clear of committing genocide or being oppressively prejudiced, however, secular liberalism then doesn’t have a lot to say about what you should be doing. Besides vaguely sacred communal rituals such as listening to NPR, reading the New York Times, or buying locally sourced organic vegetables, secular liberals are not given much guidance on how to actually live their lives. And this vacuum has to be filled by something—avoiding human rights abuses still leaves a lot of hours in the day.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity

“... work in social psychology has made it clear that cognitive control is a limited resource. When a teacher taps on a dozing student's desk and says: "Pay attention!" it turns out that this is not a metaphor: attention is costly, and if it is "spent" on one task there is less available to spend on another. This phenomenon is known as "ego depletion". ... The moral? Effort is effort, mental or physical.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity

“Brain imaging studies suggest that a couple brain areas in particular are involved in cognitive control: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the lateral prefrontal cortex (lateral PFC). We’ll be referring to these together as the “cognitive control regions” of the brain. There is still some debate about the precise role played by each of these regions, but one plausible characterization is that the ACC is a kind of smoke detector, and the lateral PFC is the fire response team. Like a smoke detector, the ACC is in constant monitoring mode, waiting to detect a whiff of danger, such as an instance of cognitive conflict. In the case of the Stroop task, we’ve got two automatic processes that are in conflict: the identification of a typeface or color versus the automatic processing of a simple word (assuming you’re literate and it’s your native language). This conflict alerts the ACC, which then sends out an alarm to the lateral PFC to come deal with the situation. The lateral PFC is responsible for many higher cognitive functions, such as the integration of conscious and unconscious knowledge, working memory (the small spotlight of consciousness that allows us to focus on explicit information), and conscious planning. Most relevantly, when it comes to the case of the Stroop task, the lateral PFC also exerts control over other areas of the brain by strengthening the activation of task-relevant networks at the expense of other networks. By weakening certain neural pathways, the lateral PFC essentially tells them to stop doing what they are doing, which is the neural equivalent of fire-retarding foam. In the Stroop task presented above,”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity

“are spontaneously generous if forced to make instant decisions but begin to gravitate toward more selfish strategies if given time to think. All of this suggests that honest behavior is governed by automatic mental processes, whereas controlled processes are involved in lying or faking. In other words, effortless, unselfconscious behavior—behavior that is wu-wei—acts like a window into our true character.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity

“cultures—people are spontaneously generous if forced to make instant decisions but begin to gravitate toward more selfish strategies if given time to think. All of this suggests that honest behavior is governed by automatic mental processes, whereas controlled processes are involved in lying or faking. In other words, effortless, unselfconscious behavior—behavior that is wu-wei—acts like a window into our true character.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity

“ego depletion.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Ancient Art of Effortlessness and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity

“No single person could hope to reproduce this inherited wisom on his own. As Confucius puts it, "I once engaged in thought for an entire day without eating and an entire night without sleeping., but it did no good. It would have been better for me to have spent that time learning." Thinking on one's own might be compared to randomly banging on a piano: a million monkeys given a million years might produce something, but its better to start with Mozart.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity

“are spontaneously generous if forced to make instant decisions but begin to gravitate toward more selfish strategies if given time to think.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity

“A substantial literature on “verbal overshadowing,” for instance, suggests that consciously reflecting on our perceptions or evaluations of taste, and then being forced to put them into words, actually impairs our judgment.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Ancient Art of Effortlessness and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity