Name: Lao Tzu - "Do Nothing", Achieve Everything
Uploaded: 2021-10-15T17:40:39.000Z
Duration: 6 min 40 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

After reading Taoist texts, I walked away with the impression that everything can be

Basic passive voice

Wu Wei is literally translated as “not-doing”, “non-action”, or “inaction”.

So when taken at face value, this seems to suggest that you can accomplish everything

So Wu Wei is often translated more loosely as “effortless action” or “unforced

action”, but I prefer the term “sincere action”.

Everything, in my opinion, is achieved through sincere action.

To fully explore what that means, let's start with a thought experiment.

Imagine that you woke up in a small sailboat.

An ocean filled with thousands of other boats surrounds you, and there's no land in sight.

“You should stay with the majority,” a man says to you.

“There's great strength in numbers, and strength will get us to land.”

“Pssst…you should stick with us,” a woman whispers.

We'll move faster as a minority, and speed will get us to land.”

Or perhaps you open your sails and let the wind and current take you wherever they lead.

/There's no reason to follow anyone else/, you think.

/No one here actually knows the way to land, and even if they did, I can't verify it

What knowledge do they have that I couldn't get myself?

I'll do what seems right to me in each moment./

Allowing the winds and currents to carry you along is Wu Wei, or in my words, “sincere

In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in the entry on Daoism, it says, “To act

without wei is to remove the social, conceptual character from our behavior and act on 'natural'

So in my understanding, to act without wei is to act without any “shoulds”.

There's no “I should do this” or “I should do that”.

There's no outer authority to follow blindly.

There's only “this seems best to me based on my current knowledge and experience.”

So how does sincere action lead one to achieve everything?

To start, our actions arise from our understanding of the world.

So right actions depend on right understanding.

But obviously our understanding of the world is flawed and incomplete.

So what's more important than understanding?

We want our understanding to improve over time, and sincerity is necessary for learning.

Learning is a natural process that occurs when a human is /involved/ in the world.

I'm using the term /involved/ in a very specific way here.

/Involvement/ has two conditions: sincerity and feedback.

Sincerity is when you act genuinely, in a way that seems best to you, in a way that's

When you act sincerely, there's no one else to point the finger at.

All you can say is, “that's what I wanted.”

Feedback is when you're not sheltered from the consequences of your actions, for better

Think about how easily you learn the mechanics of a video game.

First, you're sincere in wanting to play and figure the game out.

Second, the game gives you feedback on your actions, allowing you to adjust your actions

So when sincerity and feedback exist, learning occurs naturally.

Now think about the last time you crammed for a test.

So there was no sincerity in your studying.

You studied because you felt you should to get a good job or please your parents.

But you used flashcards to study, so there was feedback.

What happens when you have feedback without sincerity?

You may have memorized the facts for a test, but how long was it until you forgot them?

Feedback without sincerity doesn't lead to true learning.

Now think about a summer, perhaps when you were younger, where you spent your time doing

nothing but playing games and eating junk food.

You might say, “Well that's what I would do again if I was really acting sincerely.

But I have to make myself do other things if I want to succeed.”

The problem here is a lack of real world feedback.

Someone who's sheltered from the consequences of playing video games and eating junk food

never learns to not do those activities because there's no real consequences for their actions.

So sincerity without feedback results in no learning.

So right action comes from right understanding.

Learning comes from involvement in the world.

Involvement comes from sincere action and feedback.

And to act sincerely is to live without wei or, in other words, to live Wu Wei.

And to live Wu Wei, is to allow the winds and currents to take you, and so by “doing

As always, this is just my opinion and understanding of the Taoist concept of Wu Wei, not advice.

Feel free to use this information however you like, and if you have a different take

on Wu Wei, I'd love to hear your perspective in