A few years ago, I spent a few years not trying by all traditional measures. (Read: not trying to advance my career, not trying to save money, not trying to lose weight, not trying to get married, not trying to get likes. Not trying.)

What I was doing instead was getting therapy. A lot of it. I was also dancing (every Tuesday at 7, and often like no one was watching, in a room of about 100 others who were doing the same.)

In the years of not trying I did a lot of sitting on the roots of trees and staring at birds as they surfed on invisible shelves of wind, directionless, and dream-like.

I snapped a not insignificant number of pictures of what I called “City Nature,” or plants in interaction with the man-made world. (Think: vines scaling stop signs, flowers flourishing through concrete and tree roots shaped like sidewalk squares.)

About 5 to 6 times a year I’d fly off to some remote place for some obscure retreat, where I knew no one, but would cry and scream and dance and sometimes disrobe in front of them anyway. By the end we’d call each other family. They, too, were trying something other than trying.

 

On more than several occasions I took psychedelic “medicine” that came from plants whose healing mechanism was the revelation—delivered in various ways— that there was never anything wrong with me in the first place. This was potent medicine, indeed.

In the not-trying years I took a bunch of classes that weren’t meant to go on my resume or earn me any money. Every Thursday for six weeks, for example, I climbed the many creaking stairs behind an old Times Square theater and sang with lawyers and mothers and computer programmers and other non-gifted performers, while our teacher played the piano and allowed us to hear our own voices for the first time in our lives. Once a month, for 8 of those months, I woke up at 4 in the morning to chant with my turban-clad teacher in a midtown yoga studio near Penn Station. On one weekend, I stared into a stranger’s eyes for an entire day, and on a few different Monday evenings in LA, I set aside time to cuddle with a group of about 40 people I didn’t really know.

There were some pitfalls to that lifestyle, as you might imagine, but I have to tell you—the years of not-trying turned out to be an incredibly productive time—though you wouldn’t know it by checking my LinkedIn updates or Facebook milestones.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the not-trying era is that there came a discernible moment in which I knew that that lifestyle—at least for that moment—was wrapping up. It was time to go back into the world.

At this point, I was surprised to discover that without actually trying to make it so, my life had blossomed into something pretty close to my version of ideal.

My career went from a “have to,” to a “get to,”—and my income tripled in the process. I stumbled into a beautiful partnership with a man—sans apps! And thanks to the years of not trying, I’m not trying to have him complete me, save me or be anything other than his wonderful self. Also, I’ve bought a home. I have investments. I started hanging out in Costa Rica a few months a year. I surf! I run! I lift! I Pilates! I Paddleboard! I don’t hate my body. I don’t hate hanging out with my parents. I dance daily. I speak up in meetings, and I have boundaries around the number of meetings I’ll take. I seem to repel Gossips, Complainers and Energy Vampires. (Not Sorry.) I’m not afraid of my feelings. And, I still don’t care about LinkedIn Updates or Facebook Milestones.

I don’t share these things to brag, but to set up the following proposition:

What if you released the grip on what you think you have to achieve, or to put it even more bluntly: what if you stopped trying?

Just for a little while.

What would that make possible?

Does the thought of letting go allow your shoulders to drop down away from your ears a bit.
Do you feel the relief already?

If the answer is yes, then your heart already knows what I’m going to say next, but since you’ve read this far, I’ll spell it out:

It’s safe to let go—of just one thing, or of all the things.

You can take it from me that when you unhook your life from the scaffolding of society, it turns out that you don’t disappear into nothingness. Infact, you appear—whole, good and gleaming—in front of your own eyes, perhaps for the very first time in your life.

And here’s the other thing about “trying”, that I learned during the years that I wasn’t: whatever you’re after isn’t out there anyway. It’s in you—quite literally. The source of all that you want is found inside of your body. You don’t have to understand the mechanics of it—(few do, read: Jesus and Buddha, and maybe Oprah and Tony Robbins)—but it pays to at least become acquainted with the you that is your mind-body-soul apparatus—not just the you that is your resume and follower count. Tune and tweak your life from within, and the output will reflect those updates.

(In other words, if it helps to think of this “not trying” thing as a productivity hack, well it wouldn’t be a complete stretch.)