How to Get What You Want By Letting Go [The Backwards Law]

in Navy SEAL training there is something called drown proofing where they bind your hands behind your back tie your feet together and drop you into a 9-t [Music] pool your job is to survive for 5 minutes now like Navy SEAL training in general most people who attempt drown proofing fail at it but some people make it and they do so because they understand two counterintuitive lessons the first lesson of drown proofing is paradoxical the more you struggle to keep your head above water the more likely you are to sink and drown see the trick to

drown proofing is to actually let yourself sink you let yourself sink to the bottom of the pool and then you push yourself off the bottom to come back to the top or you gain another breath and you repeat the cycle over again so in a strange way drown proofing doesn't require you to have superhuman strength or in insane endurance in fact you don't even have to know how to swim on the contrary drown proofing actually requires that you know how to not swim the second lesson of drown proofing is the more you panic the more

likely you are to burn oxygen and energy and the more likely you are to fall unconscious in a sick and twisted way the the exercise turns your survival mechanisms against you and if you think about it the skill that drown proofing demands the ability to give yourself up to some higher cause the ability to relinquish control in the face of death the ability to let go under the most stressful and trying circumstances it makes sense why this is part of Navy SEAL training and in this video I want to argue that this is not only

an important skill for the Navy Seals I want to argue that it's an important skill for life [Music] most people assume that the relationship between effort and reward is one to one we think that working twice as long we will get twice as much done we think that if we spend twice as much time with somebody they will feel twice as loved but here's the thing most things in life actually don't exist on a linear curve in fact linear curves only exists for Mindless rot repetitive tasks like filling out paperwork or driving a car or

making widgets in a factory in all these cases somebody who does it for 2 hours is going to likely double the output of somebody who does it for 1 hour the linear curve doesn't work for life because most of life's activities aren't simple they're not rote or repetitive or mindless they are actually complex and emotionally or psychologically demanding you adapt and evolve in and circumstances change and this is what makes life so complicated therefore most activities in life actually exist on something called a diminishing returns curve diminishing returns means that the more you experience something

the less rewarding it becomes the classic example here is productivity working for 2 hours is probably going to be twice as productive as working for one working for four might be twice as productive as two working for eight probably not and working for 16 hours is definitely not twice as productive as working for eight the concept of diminishing returns applies for experiences that are complex and novel think of the number of showers you take in a day the number of chicken wings you eat for lunch the number of times you have sex in a week

the number of countries you've visited in your lifetime friendships also operate on a diminishing returns curve if you only have one friend having two is probably life-changing if you have two friends having four or five is probably a little bit better but having 10 probably starts to get annoying as I said sex has diminish returns as does eating as does drinking as does partying as does traveling as does reading books hiring employees scheduling business meetings studying for an exam masturbating staying up late to play video games the examples are endless because the amount of complex

and novel experiences we can have are also endless but there's another curve to Human Experience and it's probably a curve you've never seen or thought of before that's because I come up with this [ __ ] let's call it the inverted curve the inverted curve is the Bizarro Twilight Zone of effort reward curves where every increasing amount of effort towards an experience actually makes it worse that is the more effort you put into doing something the more you will fail to do it now this might sound insane and completely Prof but drown proofing I would

argue is one of the few activities that exists on an inverted curve now if you sit and think really hard you could probably come up with a handful of other human activities uh meditation dancing trying to impress people but for all intents and purposes most things in life the more you try at them the better you get so what's the big deal well I would argue that the importance of the inverted curve is when it comes to experiences that only exist Within our own minds and because everything else we experience in life is interpreted through

the experiences we have in our own minds I would argue that understanding inverted curves is extremely [ __ ] important so let's review really quick for simple mindless repetitive tasks effort and reward tend to have a linear relationship the more time you spend in the car the further you get for complex novel experiences that involve social relationships creativity new experiences is they tend to have a diminishing relationship between effort and reward that is a diminishing curve and then for emotional and psychological experiences that only exist inside our own minds that is where the inverted Curve

Kicks in the more you pursue happiness the further away from it you get the more you try to feel confident the more you question yourself and feel insecure the more you wish to be loved the more your neediness repels people around you the constant desire to be free from constraints is is itself a constraint ald this Huxley once wrote the harder we try with the conscious will to do something the less we shall succeed proficiency and results come only to those who have learned the paradoxical Art of Doing and not doing or combining relaxation with

activity the most fundamental components of our psychology operate in this way this is because when we consciously desire a particular state of mind we inadvertently create the opposite state of mind so it's by wanting to be happy that we remind ourselves that we are not happy it's wanting to be confident that we remind ourselves we are not confident it's by wanting to be loved that we remind ourselves that we don't feel love the inverted curve at its core is the backwards law that I describ in chapter one of the subtle art of not giving a

[ __ ] Desiring a positive experience is itself a negative experience and the acceptance of a negative experience is itself a positive experience but this extends to most if not all of our mental health and relationships whether it's our desire to feel more happiness confidence control satisfaction security novelty all of these things by wanting them we simply move ourselves further away from them it's by wanting to stay on the surface of our satisfaction that we only cause ourselves to plunge deep into the water these internal psychological experiences exist on an inverted curve because they are

both the cause and effect of the same thing the mind when you desire happiness your mind is both the thing that desires and the thing that is desired when it comes to these lofty abstract goals our mind is like a dog that after successfully chasing and catching all sorts of other things in its life has decided to turn on its own tail and try to catch its tail I mean why not chasing things has worked for everything else in life why wouldn't it work for happiness or confidence or security but a dog can never catch

her own tail the more she chases the more the tail seems to run away that's because the dog lacks the perspective to understand that she and the tail are the same thing the goal is to take your mind a wonderful tool that has spent its life chasing many many things and teach it to stop chasing its own tail to teach it to achieve what it desires by giving up what it desires to show it that the only way to reach the surface is to let itself sink and how do we do this you do this

by relinquishing control not because you feel powerless but because you are powerful because you have decided to let go of things that are beyond your control you decide to accept that sometimes people will not like you but you engage with them anyway that sometimes you will not feel confident but you do the thing anyway that sometimes you will not be happy but you will get out of bed anyway you decide to accept that most of the things you do in your life will result in failure and not only is that okay it's the only way

to get back to the surface to breathe to do it again