Striving is to try very hard and expend much energy
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Allow things to happen without striving
- Obsessive goal orientation. The desire of most people today for quick, sure, and highly visible results is perhaps the deadliest enemy of mastery. George Leonard
- Life just is. You have to flow with it. Give yourself to the moment. Let it happen. Gerry Brown
- The power of calm: In matters of the mind, the more mental effort you apply to any given situation, the less will be the result. Richard Carlson
- Nothing comes into being all at once; not even the grape or the fig. If you say to me now, I want a fig, I shall answer, that requires time. Let the tree blossom first, then put forth its fruit, and finally let the fruit ripen. Epictetus
- If your teeth are clenched and your fists are clenched, your lifespan is probably clenched. Terri Guillemets
- You only lose what you cling to. Buddha
- An obsession does not help you at all to reach your objective, and even ends up taking the pleasure out of the climb. Paulo Coelho
- By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try, the world is beyond winning. Lao Tzu
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Act without trying too hard
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Your ability to accomplish things actually increases as you relax…
- Being relaxed, at peace with yourself, confident, emotionally neutral, loose, and free-floating – these are the keys to successful performance in almost everything. Wayne Dyer
- Everything you do can be done better from a place of relaxation. Stephen C. Paul
- In karate there is an image that’s used to define the position of perfect readiness: “mind like water.” Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn’t overreact or underreact. David Allen
- Life is water, and we tend to push too hard, thrash about, force things, struggle. Instead, learn to float, learn to allow things to become effortless. Leo Babauta
- The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be. Bruce Lee
- The more tranquil a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good. Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom. James Allen
- The power of calm: In matters of the mind, the more mental effort you apply to any given situation, the less will be the result. Richard Carlson
- The pursuit, even of the best things, ought to be calm and tranquil. Marcus Tullius Cicero
- Wherever I go in the midst of movement and activity, I carry my stillness with me. Deepak Chopra
- Your ability to be productive is directly proportional to your ability to relax. David Allen
- Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. David Allen
- Relaxation, Calmness
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… while trying too hard jams our creative abilities
- Conscious effort inhibits and ‘jams’ the automatic creative mechanism. Maxwell Maltz
- Time is like that: cussed when we try to speed up, a dear friend when we slow down. Richard Koch
- The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.
- Excessive effort can also result from impatience or exaltation, two states that lead nowhere. If you begin climbing a high mountain at a run, your lungs will soon force you to stop. In the same way, if you draw a bow too far, it will break, or if you try to cook on too high a flame, you will end up burning your food. Matthieu Ricard
- Stress is poison. Agave Powers
- We find our energies are actually cramped when we are overanxious to succeed. Michel de Montaigne
- Creativity
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Our true nature is effortlessness, not striving
- As long as there is drivenness, then we cannot experience our true nature. Our true nature is effortless. It is the nature of nature itself – an effortless spontaneous flow. Whether we realize it or not, all of us, from infancy on, start to acquire drivenness, compulsiveness, grabbiness, and that covers over our true nature. As long as that is covered over…life is going to be suffering. On the other hand, we could just as well say that Buddhism teaches that life is heaven on earth if we see what is really there. Shinzen Young
- Effortlessness
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Don’t strive for happiness, allow it in
- Happiness is as a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond our grasp, but which, if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you. N. Hawthorne
- He who bends to himself a joy doth the winged life destroy. But he who kisses a joy as it flies lives in Eternity’s sunrise. William Blake
- Now and then, it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just BE happy. Guillaume Apollinaire
- The farmer loses his watch in the barn. He gets a group of boys to go into the barn and try to find it. They search high and low but cannot locate it. They leave. One of the boys then goes in alone and comes out with the watch. “How did you find it?” asks the famer. The boy says, “I found it by sitting quietly and listening for the ticking.” It’s the same with happiness. If you sit quietly, it’ll come and find you. Behram Ghista
- If you want to be happy, be. Leo Tolstoy
- Happiness
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Let go of striving by focusing more on the process than the result
- “How” is always more important that “what.” See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it. Eckhart Tolle
- How do you surrender? Just let go! Don’t strain to achieve; instead, enjoy the process of the work that you are doing. The results will come independent of your striving for them. When your mind is on the result rather than what you are doing, you create inner discord that blocks any and all possibilities for miracles to show up. Prosperity is about process, not outcome. Purpose is about loving and giving. Wayne Dyer
- How do you surrender? Just let go! Don’t strain to achieve; instead, enjoy the process
- I know some people say ‘Keep your eyes on the prize,’ but I disagree. When your eyes are stuck on the prize, you’re going to keep stumbling and crashing into things. If you really want to get ahead, you’ve got to keep your eyes focused on the path. Russell Simmons
- The landscape changes, so enjoy it: of course, you have to have an objective in mind – to reach the top. But as you are going up, more things can be seen, and it’s no bother to stop now and again and enjoy the panorama around you. At every meter conquered, you can see a little further, so use this to discover things that you still had not noticed. Paulo Coelho
- When you are on a journey, it is certainly helpful to know where you are going or at least the general direction in which you are moving, but don’t forget: The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step that you are taking at this moment. That’s all there ever is. Eckhart Tolle
- When you travel towards your objective, be sure to pay attention to the path. The path teaches us the best way to arrive and enriches us while we are traveling along it. Paulo Coelho
- Truth is more in the process than in the result. Jiddu Krishnamurti
- Life is a journey to enjoy now, not a destination.
- Life is a process, Life is a journey
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