The Harder You Grip

"So the interview went well, right?"

"Don't say it. Don't jinx it."

Maybe you knock on wood for good measure.

Most of us half-believe some version of this: say out loud how badly you want something, and it slips away.

Look back far enough and you can probably find the evidence. The thing you wanted most, the one you lay awake over, fell through. Meanwhile, something you barely thought about just worked out.

The more you want to impress someone, the more likely you are to say something you regret. Tell yourself not to be nervous, and feel your palms start to sweat.

The more you want it, the further away it seems. Is that just superstition?

The girl who wasn't trying

A while ago I watched an interview with the two lead actresses of My Brilliant Friend. The show's casting is famous: the producers spent seven months in Naples and auditioned more than 9,000 children. Margherita Mazzucco, who ended up playing Lenù, had never acted and had never planned to. Lots of kids at her school tried out, so she did too, "without really thinking about it," as she later said. A month later she heard she'd made the shortlist. She didn't quite believe it until filming started.

Out of nine thousand kids, the one who wasn't trying got the part.

To be fair, stories like this deserve a little skepticism. We tend to remember the things we wanted and didn't get, and overlook the things we have but never chased. Some of the pattern is just selective memory.

But even after you account for that, trying too hard really can backfire. I can think of at least three reasons why.

Reason one: Your head gets in the way

In the early 1970s, a tennis coach named Timothy Gallwey noticed something odd. The less he said during lessons, the better his students played. Many fixed their mistakes before he got around to correcting them. Sometimes his instructions actually made it harder for them to get it right.

In The Inner Game of Tennis, he explained why. Every player, he wrote, has two selves. Self 1 is the voice in your head that gives orders and judges every shot. Self 2 is your body, which usually already knows what to do.

One of his students, Dorothy, got a gentle suggestion: lift your follow-through from waist height to shoulder height. She tried so hard that her face tensed and her forearm went rigid, and the racket finished only a few inches higher. A coach's usual response would be "Better, but relax. Don't try so hard!" But she had no idea how to relax while trying hard.

Then there was Paul, a complete beginner. This time Gallwey skipped the instructions. He hit ten forehands and asked Paul just to watch and hold a picture of the stroke in his mind. Paul's first swing was smooth and finished right at shoulder height. Only one thing was off: his feet hadn't moved. When Gallwey pointed it out, Paul realized he'd forgotten about them. Of the whole stroke, his feet were the one thing he had consciously tried to remember.

It's also why some people fall apart the moment someone says "you've got this." Expectation hands the microphone to Self 1. Must win. Can't mess up. The louder that voice gets, the less your body listens.

Reason two: The tighter you hold on, the more you fear losing it

"I have to get this" has a flip side: "What if I don't?" Grab one, and the other comes with it. The more something matters, the bigger the shadow of not getting it.

So you never fully commit. Part of you is doing the work; part of you is quietly bracing for failure. Your attention slides off the task and onto the feeling.

Anyone who has lain awake at 3 a.m. knows this one. The harder you order yourself to sleep, the more awake you get.

The philosopher Alan Watts called it the backwards law, and he used swimming to explain it: try to stay on the surface and you sink; relax, and the water holds you up.

Reason three: We mistake desire for a goal

This is the one I've thought about most. Desires and goals look alike, but they're not the same thing.

A goal is a direction. It asks: what can I do now? Desire is a feeling of lack. It says: I can't be okay without this. And it only has eyes for the outcome.

Say you've just moved somewhere new, and you really want people to like you.

As a goal, that's workable. You ask what you can do: listen more, be genuinely curious about people, keep showing up. Friendships follow.

As a desire, they have to like me, it turns into self-surveillance. Was that comment weird? Why didn't he laugh? You get so busy performing a likable version of yourself that you can't actually connect with anyone. We're often at our least natural exactly when we most want to be liked.

The Tao Te Ching says that because the sage does not compete, no one can compete with him. But not competing doesn't mean not trying. It means you keep walking toward the goal, without the clenched grip of having to get there.

What you can control, and what you can't

So what can we do about it? A good place to start is figuring out which part is actually yours.

Every outcome has a part you control and a part you don't. How well you prepare is yours. Timing, luck and what other people think are not. And even within your part, the only thing you fully control is whether you act, not whether it works.

A lot of suffering comes from trying to use desire to control the half that isn't ours.

A friend of mine works in the US and entered the lottery for a work visa. She wanted it badly. When she missed out, again, she was so upset she took the next day off. Moving back home, she told me, was the one thing she wouldn't do.

I respect that. But what hurt most wasn't just losing the lottery. It was believing she had only one road. When you want one outcome too much, it's easy to forget there are others.

The kind of "going with the flow" I'm after is this: give everything to the part I can control, and let the rest be.

Pretending not to care is still trying

So is the answer to act like you don't care?

Back to "don't jinx it." Refusing to say it out loud, telling yourself in advance it probably won't happen: it looks like letting go, but it's just another kind of grip. You care so much that you rehearse the disappointment ahead of time, so the real thing hurts less.

This fake calm comes in two versions. One is for an audience: whatever, I don't mind, while inside you want it more than anyone. The other is for yourself: you talk yourself out of wanting it, so you can't be let down.

Eckhart Tolle warns about this in The Power of Now. "I don't care" is often not acceptance at all, he says, but resistance wearing a mask. Real letting go doesn't require hiding what you want.

Surrender isn't giving up

So what does real letting go look like?

Tolle offers an image. You step into mud and get stuck. One response: fine, I guess I live here now. That isn't surrender; it's resignation. The other: admit plainly that you're stuck, without cursing it or calling it a disaster, and put all your attention on the next move. Find something solid. Pull your foot out.

That can sound abstract. The clearest example I know is Michael Singer, author of The Surrender Experiment.

In the early 1970s, Singer was an economics grad student. After a profound inner awakening, he noticed a voice in his head that never stopped: I like this, I hate that, things should go this way, not that way. To quiet it, he set himself an experiment. If life put something in front of him, and his only reason to say no was that he didn't like it, he would say yes.

He later boiled it down to two steps. First, let go of your personal likes and dislikes. Second, look at what the situation in front of you needs, and give it everything.

The first step sounds like giving up. The second is the point.

What he wanted most was to meditate alone in the woods. Life kept handing him other things. Someone asked him to teach a college class. Someone asked him to help build a house. By his preferences, these were interruptions. By his experiment, he said yes, and did each one properly. Then he came across a computer, taught himself to code, and wrote software to help doctors manage patients and billing. It grew into a company called Medical Manager, which WebMD bought in 2002.

Notice the order. He never wanted a company. He wanted quiet. The company grew out of setting aside what he wanted, again and again, and doing what was in front of him well.

The hardest test came later. In 2003 the FBI raided his company, and he was indicted. His lawyer told him it would take a miracle to get the charges dropped. If there was ever a moment to cling to an outcome, or to fall apart, this was it. He used the same two steps: accept that it was happening, without fighting it; then do the next thing that needed doing, one at a time, and let the result go. Seven years later, the charges against him were dropped.

I'm not saying letting go guarantees a happy ending. Singer's story became a bestselling book, which alone tells you there's survivorship bias at work. What stays with me is the path he found between two extremes. He didn't resign himself and do nothing. He didn't white-knuckle any particular outcome either. He worked hard the whole time. He just spent the effort on what was in front of him, not on insisting the world go his way.

Tolle calls this surrendered action. There's a plainer Chinese saying for it: do everything you can, then leave the rest to heaven.

Let it sit at a comma

There's one more skill I'm still learning: letting things stay unresolved.

We crave certainty. We want every story to end in a period: it worked, or it didn't. But plenty of things sit at a comma for a while, with no answer yet. The more comfortable you get with that, the steadier you feel, and the less the outcome gets to push you around.

When I catch myself tensing up over a result, I try a small practice called RAIN to put a little distance between me and the feeling:

Recognize it. Oh, I'm scared about how this turns out.
Accept it. Let the feeling be there instead of shoving it away.
Investigate it. Where is it in my body? Is my stomach tight? Are my shoulders up by my ears?
Non-identify. This is a feeling I'm having. It isn't me.

Go ahead and say it

So the next time you want something badly, maybe skip the knock on wood.

Say it plainly: I really want this. Then do everything you can, and leave the rest to time.

Open your hand. It can hold more that way.