Inaction

A friend once put me on to this great series of little puzzle games online. Each one had a hidden star for you to uncover, with a slightly different trick and no instructions. The first few you would just move something out of the way to reveal the star, or move things around into a star shape, and so on. But they slowly got harder and more devious. Finally, I hit one that completely stumped me. I clicked everywhere, moved everything, pressed every button I could think of, but nothing happened. My friend was laughing the whole time until I finally gave up. And then the star appeared.

The solution was to do nothing. And, of course, that was the one thing I'd never think to try. When faced with a problem, I want to poke it, prod it, investigate it, test its limits, develop theories, try things, come at it from different angles and, above all, just do something. You don't gain any information by doing nothing, you don't learn from your mistakes by doing nothing, and you don't make progress by doing nothing. Except this time.

And, actually, there are other situations that benefit from inaction. Sleeping, for example, requires doing nothing. That can be very difficult to do, because trying to sleep is still doing something. Meditation, similarly, is mostly the art of not thinking about things. Removing an association only happens by not thinking about and reinforcing that association. And, of particular note, coming up with ideas also requires inaction.

Lastly, there are situations where you aren't able to meaningfully control the outcome. Usually not many and not completely, but there are some situations where the outcome is beyond your control. Faced with something you can't change, or that improves when you don't try to change it, the only sensible reaction is to do nothing. Anything else is just wasted energy.