The Taoists have known this for thousands of years.

They call it ‘wu-wei’ — the art of effortless action.

Of letting things occur by nature, and stepping in only when necessary.

It’s like attacking an opposing teams weakest player, or hitting the wall at the weakest point, or cutting with the grain rather than against it.

To naturally, and intelligently, go with the flow.

It applies to sport, to the mind, to business, to money.

It’s building a business in an emerging industry, instead of a dying one, so you are riding the wave, instead of paddling upstream.

It’s attacking the team or the individual where they are weakest.

It’s playing the course to the conditions.

It’s understanding the flow of money is like water: Forever changing, forever on the move, continuously changing hands.

It’s the Stock price flowing up and down over time.

Wu-Wei is like it’s own form of leverage:

The more intelligently you can observe and go with the flow, the more likely you are to be rewarded.

Letting go, is so contrary to modern society.

We are taught to push, and to work our asses off, and to seek challenges, and in truth, we are taught to make things as hard as possible for ourselves, like it’s a badge of honour.

Everything is about how hard one works.

But hard work does not guarantee success.

The hardest workers are not the richest,

or the most powerful,

or the happiest.

Hard work, was never the goal. But it’s become the goal.

Why don’t we go back, and make the goal, the goal again?

The result, the achievement, the money, the freedom, the happiness.

That’s what we’re really after, isn’t it?

Do we really want to spend our lives working our asses off, just for the sake of telling other people how hard we work?

Comparing our level of hard work, and sharing in this false sense of pride of working hard?

When we let go of the mind, we achieve freedom from the mind.

Freedom from the thoughts, and the feelings, and the emotions.

When we let go of our sense of self, we achieve a state in sports known as, the zone.

You see, the zone is not conquering the mind, or overcoming the mind.

The main symptom of the zone, is losing our sense of self completely.

The sense of self is created by the mind, in the prefontal cortex, it’s a part of our conscious mind.

If you understand these two points, you can see how the zone is not achieved through overcoming the mind.

The zone is achieved when the conscious mind disappears altogether.

When we let go of our sense of self, when we forget we’re even there, and it’s just us, and our craft.

When we let go of our conscious mind, we let go of our thoughts, and feelings, and opinions, and judgements, and expectations, and attachments, and desires, and needs and wants, and sense of self.

We are free.

We are free to be present.

We are free to perform.

We are free to access all of our skills and abilities without getting in our own way.

We are free to pursue our true goal in the most efficient and effective manner.

We are free to step back and observe the natural flow of things.

We are free to intelligently go with the flow.

We are free, from the mind.

I’ll leave you with this,

There are two ways that you can increase the rate of water flowing.

You can either spend your time forcing it to go a certain direction, and push, and apply pressure, and make it flow through effort and hard work.

Or you can spend your time choosing the path that it will naturally flow fastest toward, and spend your time removing the barriers.

Removing the rocks, and the dams, and the logs, and allow the flow.

You can either swim upstream, or you can grab a board and ride the wave.