Life's Biggest Lessons

There’s nothing worse than a sleepless night. We've all been there, tossing and turning. You focus all your mental power on trying to fall asleep. With all your will, you force yourself to shut your eyes, turn your brain off, and pray to be whisked away into sweet slumber.

10, 20, 30 minutes go by, and you're still there, eyes closed, yet still unable to fall asleep. Despite counting sheep and doing a full head-to-toe full body relaxation, you're more awake than ever, staring up at the ceiling. So, you cut your losses and decide to get up. You turn on the TV, do a crossword puzzle, or read a few chapters of a book.

Your mind is occupied, guessing the plot twist of your mystery novel or trying to come up with the capital of Nepal. Your eyelids grow heavy in your head. Bobs, your book falls face down on your chest. The TV continues to drone on in the background, and suddenly, you're fast asleep.

This is the backwards law, which states that the more we try to pursue something, the less likely we will succeed. In the case of a restless night, the more you think about your desire to fall asleep, the less likely you are to fall asleep. When your mind is elsewhere, not directly striving to achieve your intended goal, that is when you finally get some rest.

And it's funny how this works because it seems paradoxical. Why do our wants come directly to us when we give up and let go? Alan Watts was an English-born pop philosopher who is widely attributed to the backwards law. But Watts didn't invent the phenomenon; neither was he the first to recognize it. In fact, he got the idea from Zen Buddhism.

For Buddhists, desire and ignorance are at the heart of all worldly suffering. By eliminating this desire, you will no longer search for what you lack, because you will be satisfied and at peace with your life. Watts molded the Zen Buddhist perspective into the backwards law. It's called backwards because it seems counterintuitive.

In the West, we have a unique relationship with effort. Psychologist Mark Manson labels our ideas about effort as an example of linear thinking. Picture effort represented on the x-axis of a graph, with the intended results on the y-axis. The more effort we put into a given task, say learning the guitar, the better our results will be.

For some things, this is true. If you practice every day, at some point, although it might be far in the future, you could theoretically play "Stairway to Heaven," widely regarded as the most challenging song to play on the guitar. In cases like these, the backwards law doesn't apply. It's not a magic trick that allows you to improve at a task that requires sustained effort and diligence to achieve results.

This linear conception of effort and reward is etched into our brains. We usually only exert ourselves when there's a promised benefit. If your guitar experience is full of bleeding fingers and broken strings without marked progress, you will soon put the instrument down for good. The belief is that each time you practice, you will improve. Is what pushes you through the pain and setbacks.

The linear relationship between effort and reward motivates us to do complex tasks. Fundamentally, we believe our hard work deserves to be rewarded. It's not a flawed belief to have; it allows us to make goals, strive to achieve them, and feel proud when we reflect on how far we've come.

The problem is that we've become so used to this effort equals result that we expect it in every area of our lives, even in situations where it's not applicable. This way of thinking is only valid when assessing quantifiable tasks. For example, the more time you spend making bracelets, the more you make. The more cardio you do, the more endurance you build up. Because these results are measurable, we can see a direct correlation between our hard work and the outcome.

That's just not how life works. Often, our best efforts do not yield the desired results. You can do all the right things in a relationship, and your partner will still walk away. You can spend extra hours studying for a test and still fail. Sure, the effort might increase your chances of success, but you will be wrong to falsely...