I joked on Twitter a while ago that “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao… which is annoying, because I really struggle to stop my dumb ass from telling everyone about the Tao“.
I tweeted this because I was getting a little bit annoyed with myself by being so fixated on a bunch of things. My own changes, my own progress, my own learnings. I felt like I was learning a lot about the world and that the world around me didn’t seem to “get it”. It was a familiar feeling – it reminded me I think of my late teens, when I felt like I was becoming Clued In to the Real World, and became a bit of a sanctimonious, insufferable prick with my tedious, burdensome posturing.
A mutual replied “Perhaps allow the Tao to describe itself” – which really stopped me in my tracks, in the most wonderful way. It made me realize that all of my frantic gesturing probably doesn’t quite help nearly as much as I think it does. Rather than try to get people to look at something, it makes more sense to simply flow with it, to embody it. You can’t force people to get into things before they’re ready. That’s counter-productive, that’s needy, it reeks of a certain scarcity mindset. What’s the rush? What’s the worry? If you have truly stumbled upon a superior way, why not simply embody it, and allow it to be recognized on its own merits?
My brain can formulate some counter-arguments to that – “Well, people don’t always have good taste, and they don’t always see what’s good, even if it’s right in front of them. Sometimes – oftentimes, in fact – it feels like this is almost deliberately the case. If you don’t point at it, what if nobody sees it?”
But I feel like the resonance of “perhaps allow the Tao to describe itself” is still stronger. You can still “point” at it without actually pointing at it. I’m reminded now of something else I once said to another friend who asked, “how do you cope with the knowledge that many innocent beings on your planet experience brutality and torture?” My answer was, “I focus on doing what I can for the people around me“, and I elaborated that that’s not the same as ignoring it – the point is to take the emotional surge from anger at cruelty and then channel that into being a doubly kind and nourishing presence. I like that answer – I think it’s broadly correct, and for the most part it’s the best most of us can do given our circumstances.
I think there’s something similar going on with “the Tao”, or “with Everything”. Being frustrated with other people “not getting it” is a version of being frustrated with things beyond your control. It makes much more sense to take the energy you get from that frustration and re-channel it into what you do have control over.
I was talking with another friend a few days ago – my cofounder Desmond – about what’s the best thing we could be doing now, that we would look back on 10, 20 years from now and be really proud of. We’re both a little too busy with work and other commitments to be working on any particular project or set of tasks at the moment. And what I came around to was, “we ought to bring good people together.” This itself was a riff off of some thoughts about taste I had after revisiting a video of a Steve Jobs interview where he talked about taste. I’ve long been playing with the riff that taste is the most precious and important thing in the world, but I never really had a simple and succinct way for properly describing “how do you develop your taste”. I tried to circle around it in 0671 – honor your taste, but I didn’t feel like I got around to it. I also tried to piece it together with a bunch of quotes, notes and links about taste, but somehow that didn’t quite feel like it was scratching the itch either.
I finally think I got it after revisiting the Steve Jobs quote: “It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then try to bring those things in to what you’re doing.” And I subsequently tweeted about this too – when you first don’t have much taste, you’re going to have to depend on the taste of others. But as with language acquisition, after a period of imitation, you can start to develop your own vocabulary, your own sense of what’s good and what’s not.
Critically, you don’t have to agonize about this. You don’t have to be anxious about this. Agonizing is a sort of stress, and we stress to communicate that we’re serious. But you can be serious without overcommunicating it! (Perhaps allow the Tao to reveal itself!)
Really, you just need to expose yourself to the best stuff that you can expose yourself to. Simply allow yourself to be drawn to it via your own natural curiosity. And then evaluate it, consider your own feelings and responses to it. What do you like? What do you not like? What did you feel was underrated, what did you feel was overrated? Why exactly? How exactly? Articulate this carefully, and over time, boom – you have taste.
This works with not just books and movies, but with people as well. Over time you can develop good taste in people. Over time you learn to get better at filtering out people who aren’t aligned with you, who don’t serve you. (And this isn’t about filtering people from the outgroup to create a cosy little ingroup bubble – I believe strongly in aggressively seeking out outgroup members to agree with as a way of expanding your universe.)
But even with something as important as making friends – in fact, especially with something as important as making friends – don’t be anxious about it. Relax. Exhale. Smile. Have fun.
Perhaps allow the Tao to reveal itself.