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Why the Best Things in Life are All Backwards

There’s a part of Navy SEAL training called “drown-proofing” (抗溺水训练) where they bind your hands behind your back, tie your feet together, and dump you into a 9-foot-deep pool. Your job is to survive for five minutes.

Most people who try drown-proofing fail. Many of them panic and scream. But some make it. And they do so because they understand a counterintuitive (违反直觉的) lesson: the more you struggle to keep your head above water, the more likely you are to sink (下沉).

With your arms and legs bound, it’s impossible to keep yourself at the surface for the full five minutes. Even worse, your limited efforts to keep your body afloat will only cause you to sink faster. The trick to drown-proofing is to actually let yourself sink to the bottom of the pool. From there, you lightly push yourself off the pool floor and carry you back to the surface. Once there, you can have a quick breath of air and start the whole process over again.

Strangely, surviving drown-proofing requires no superhuman strength. It doesn’t even require that you know how to swim. However, it requires the ability to not swim. This skill—the ability to let go of control when one wants it most—is one of the most important skills anyone can develop. And not just for SEAL training. For life.

Most people suppose the relationship between effort and reward (回报、奖励) is one-to-one. We think that working twice as long will produce twice the results.

This is almost never true. Most of the world does not exist on a linear curve. Linear relationships only work for mindless or repetitive tasks—driving a car, filling out paperwork, cleaning the bathroom, etc. In all of these cases, doing something for two hours will double the output of doing it for one hour. But that’s simply because they require no thought or creativity.

Most activities in life do not operate along the linear effort/reward curve because most activities in life are not basic nor mindless. Most activities are complex (复杂的), mentally or emotionally involved. Therefore, most activities produce a diminishing returns curve.

Diminishing returns means that the more you experience something, the less rewarding it becomes. The classic example is money. The difference between earning $20,000 and $40,000 is life-changing. The difference between $120,000 and $140,000 means your car has nicer seat heaters. The difference between earning $127,020,000 and $127,040,000 is basically nothing.

Friendship has diminishing returns, as does eating, sleeping, working out at the gym, reading books, studying for an exam—the examples are endless.

But there’s another curve, the inverted curve, where effort and reward have a negative relation—the more effort you put into doing something, the more you will fail to do it.

Drown-proofing exists on an inverted curve. The more effort you put into rising to the surface, the more likely you will be to fail at it.

Few things in life work on an inverted curve. But the few things that do are important. In fact, the most important experiences and goals in life all exist on an inverted curve.

Going after happiness takes you further away from it. The longing for greater freedom is often what causes us to feel stuck and trapped. The need to be loved and accepted prevents us from loving and accepting ourselves.

The harder we try to do something, the less we shall succeed. This is “The Backwards Law”: desiring a positive experience is itself a negative experience; accepting a negative experience is a positive experience. The goal is to take your mind and teach it to stop chasing its own tail. To stop chasing meaning, freedom and happiness because those only serve to move it further away from itself. To show it how the only way to reach the surface is by letting itself sink.

You lean into the fear and uncertainty, and just when you think you’re going to drown, just as you reach the bottom, it will launch you back to your salvation (拯救).