The French Art of Not Trying Too Hard

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I love airport books, the kind you buy just before you get on a plane, that you read while looking out the window. Books you read out of the corner of your eye, but which imperceptibly change your way of seeing and behaving. Not quite philosophy, not quite journalism, nor personal development; more like a journalism of ideas, along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell. He gets interested in an idea, investigates it to see how it has changed people’s lives, and then writes an article or a book on it. If I had to write an airport book, I’d write one about ease. So grace is never guaranteed, and the very best, like the rest of us, are reduced just to hoping. But to know this kind of grace, to feel yourself king or queen of the earth, you don’t need to be a champion of anything: soccer, tennis, literature, or music simply serve here to underline the oneness of the experience, of the point of action, when “it takes,” when “it works,” when it’s “just great,” when “it” is impossible to express in words or transcribe with notes, because talking, like composing, means detaching yourself from what you’re experiencing, coming out of it and commenting on it, instead of staying “in it.” The best way of talking about the point of action, then, is through the dot dot dot of an ellipsis . . . My favourite part of the book, Stop Thinking, walks through hypnosis, yoga, non-thinking, archery and modern rationalism to distinguish between thought and action - “Take a path you don’t know, to reach an unknown place, to do something you’re incapable of doing”

When we say “France,” France itself is no more than an idea—une certaine idée—which exists in the collective imagination in its condensed form of “Paris,” the international symbol of all forms of freedom, the dream of thinkers and artists. This Paris is evoked in the alluringly titled Le Rendez-vous des étrangers (Where Strangers Meet) by Elsa Triolet, Louis Aragon’s muse—a Paris in which the Spanish Picasso, Russian Chagall, and Italian Giacometti all felt at home, and with good reason: i can conclude this book for you: “the key to action is getting down to it” that’s also one of the phrases the author uses in their conclusion and that’s literally all it says throughout using different words like okay i wouldn’t t know exactly cause i started skimming during chapter 2/3 but that’s what i believe through my expertise in skimmingOK. Place your left foot delicately on the rope. Your weight should remain on your supporting leg, the straight one, that’s still planted on the solid ground of the south tower, safely on the building. Now you have to shift the weight of this leg onto the other one, taking the first step onto the rope. There comes a moment where you have to decide. The first step is a point of no return. To escape difficulty, you must stop resisting. Ease will come once you give it a chance. Being in a natural state, such as that of many greek statues, puts us in a natural state of ease, which enables us to stop resisting. Proper posture is important for a variety of reasons, as it helps to enable grace (or flow). Your imagination is at the heart of your life. If you can image something, you can create it; such is what is proven by the arts. Grace is also a state of flow. It is a complete merge of the self with action, without the interference of intellect or other factors. The body is barely embodied by knowing and not by thinking. There is no self correction, judgement, or anything else. There is just pure action and the fluid movements of the body doing what it was meant to do. It is effortless and the result of not thinking or trying to escape from the physical state of being into a mental or emotional state of judgement or control.

What can we learn from Stendhal’s example? Not everyone wants to become a writer. But “never make fun of the art of writing,” Alain says, Even in 1806, I was waiting for the moment of genius to strike before starting writing . . . If I had talked about my writing plans in 1795, some reasonable man might have said to me: “Write every day for an hour or two. Genius or not.” With this piece of advice I could have put ten years of my life to good use, instead of foolishly waiting for the stroke of genius. To be alive is to be part of the narrative of experience, to be engaged with the world. We are always caught up in the action. So we don’t have to begin, we just have to continue. No need for big decisions. To explain what he meant, Alain took the example he knew best—writing. He quoted Stendhal, who, by his own admission, wasted ten years of his life waiting for inspiration: Inundated with astonishment, with sudden and extreme fear, yes, with great joy and pride, I hold myself in balance on the high wire. With ease.According to the rule of 10,000 hours, though, it’s the number of hours spent training that should explain the variations. Now, according to another study (also conducted by Ericsson, this time with darts players rather than violinists), after fifteen years of practice, only 28 percent of the variation in performance can be attributed to training. To put it another way, you can train your whole life without ever catching up on the difference between yourself and the best, or acquiring real expertise. The rule of 10,000 hours, David Epstein concludes, with some humor, would be better called the rule of 10,000 years. I rejected the suffering that comes from pursuing a path to which one is not suited. Effort against the grain is exhausting. It’s a sign of courage and of abnegation, but above all it’s a sign of self-deprivation. A negative virtue is not without value, but in the end someone who doesn’t like what they do will never go as far as someone who enjoys it. The former will do everything on sufferance; the latter will do it with joy, including suffering if necessary. A characteristic of a good sledge dog is that he enjoys pulling a weight for hundreds of kilometers. You don’t have to push him to do it. Eric Morris, a specialist in these matters, explains that to train sledge dogs to go very long distances, as in the Iditarod, known among enthusiasts as the “last great race on Earth” (over 1,500 kilometers through the cold, long nights of Alaska), there’s no point in using food as a reward. Negative reinforcement, a training technique that consists not in giving a reward but in taking away a punishment, doesn’t work either. “To go that distance, it’s like a bird dog sniffing down a pheasant . . . it has to be the one thing in their life that brings them the greatest amount of pleasure. They have to have the innate desire to pull [the sledge] . . . and you will find varying degrees of that in different dogs.” Why ten years, when by working ten hours a day you’d get to 10,000 hours in a thousand days, which is less than three years? Because it’s not enough to accumulate hours of practice; the practice has to be deliberate, it has to represent an effort to achieve a specific goal, ability, or gesture that as yet eludes you. To put it another way, you need to feel the time passing, it needs to not be easy. This is quite different from the so-called ten hours a day spent by Zola or Flaubert, who seem like workaholics when in fact they spent most of their time dreaming of the right word, “fiddling around” with their sentences like Giacometti fiddling around with his clay; in short, doing what they liked best, which takes a lot of deliberately wasted time and a certain kind of nonchalance. Nothing to do with continuous effort, in any case. Three or four hours a day of deliberate practice, preferably spread out over several sessions, would therefore be a maximum, because the effort of all that attention is exhausting. The rest of the day should be spent resting, or in comparatively less intense activities: reading, reflection, strategy, associated leisure activities, and so on. Three to four hours a day with one day of rest a week, and two weeks of holiday a year, gets you to 1,000 hours a year, or 10,000 hours in ten years. The most profound aspect of the book is how it starts, with the famous quote and ultimate take away of the work: "The whole doctrine of action can be expressed in two chapters, each of which contains a single word. Chapter one, continue. Chapter two, start. The other which people find surprising, espresso almost the whole idea" (Alain). As we’ve seen, once you’ve started, you just need to keep going. The stones you’ve laid in a wall give you the shape of the stones you’re going to have to put in next. The more the wall grows, the less room there is for hesitation or chance, the more you are bound by necessity. But how can you dare to start? Laying the first stone may be no big deal, but taking the first step . . . Freedom is dizzying, and the infinity of possible outcomes is a promise of failure, a sky without stars, a metaphysical void studded only with questions: why do this and not that? Why go this way, not that? At least a tightrope walker knows which way he must go. Straight ahead. Sixty meters of cable. The route is laid out. He hesitates not over the direction, but over how to take the first step. No more choices after that. This is not the case in all activities, obviously. The tightrope walker is an extreme case, a metaphor for all the rest. The way you start, in whatever field of activity, contains the seed of future success or failure. It’s not enough just to set out—you have to set out confidently. Whether in horse riding, running, work, or love, the first step dictates whatever comes next. If you set out confidently your chances of achieving your goal are infinitely greater. A bit like in archery: an arrow that is fired cleanly has already hit the bull’s-eye; its flight is already accomplished at the instant it leaves the bow. This is not a matter of predestination: until the moment it’s released, the arrow is going nowhere. Nothing is laid out in advance, but the endpoint of an arrow’s flight is inscribed in its beginning, and for the archer there is a way of beginning the movement that guarantees it will end well. To start out well is to end well, in the same movement. You mustn’t try. You must succeed the first time. And therefore, until you feel the presence of the endpoint, until you feel you’ve reached it, you can’t actually begin. You could, you should, but still you hesitate.