By-products: Most Precious Things Cannot Be Directly Pursued

Imagine you want to improve your sleep, so you buy a tracking wristband to monitor your deep sleep percentage and heart rate variability. Your goal is a sleep score of 90. The first night, you get an 82, and you’re frustrated; the second night, you go to bed early, lying in the dark, repeatedly telling yourself to “sleep, sleep,” but only score a 74; by the third night, you even start to dread going to bed. Before long, you’re convinced you suffer from chronic insomnia.

Is it possible that your very desire to sleep is what’s keeping you awake? The field of sleep medicine has a specific term for this: “orthosomnia” [1].

In fact, everyone has this experience: the more you try to fall asleep, the less you can.

Sleep is one such state: the more directly you pursue it, the more elusive it becomes; only when you create the right conditions and then let go, does it finally arrive.

Many things in life, especially the most precious ones, are like this. You sit at your desk frantically searching for inspiration, but it eludes you; you go for a walk, and inspiration suddenly strikes you. The more an athlete thinks, “I mustn’t make a mistake,” the more likely their form will falter; forgetting oneself, they perform at their best. People who constantly try to please others and manage their connections gain little respect; conversely, those admired are the ones who simply love to do their work.

Danny Chan once sang in an old song: “Sought everywhere yet lost, unhoped for yet in hand.”

This is not mere self-consolation of scholars or artists. There’s a principle behind this. As we’ve mentioned before, you should set your own objective function; you have the right to pursue what you desire. However, what this article will explore is: the things you want most precisely cannot be directly written into your objective function.

This thinking tool, we call “by-products.”

Precious States Obtainable Only as By-products #

In 1983, Norwegian social scientist Jon Elster published a book called Sour Grapes, with a chapter specifically dedicated to this phenomenon [2]. Elster pointed out that there exists a category of psychological and social states that can only arise as by-products of “actions undertaken for other purposes.”

Elster termed these “states that are essentially by-products,” and the things he listed include sleep, spontaneity, belief, courage, dignity, charm, being respected, and being loved.

“Essentially” means these things only appear as by-products. Of all things in the world, many happen to be by-products. For instance, you go for a morning run to improve your cardiovascular fitness, but you get a tan incidentally – the tan is an accidental by-product, and if you wanted to specifically get a tan, there would be no issue.

Essential by-products, however, are fundamentally impossible to obtain directly – it’s not merely “difficult to obtain directly,” but logically impossible.

Why? Because your deliberate attempt to create them automatically precludes the very state you wish to achieve.

Take acting, for instance. Truly natural acting inherently possesses spontaneity. The more deliberately you try to act naturally, the further you stray from spontaneity, appearing stiff and artificial.

And charisma: a person who is witty and vibrant, we say they have charisma. But as soon as they start displaying charisma, you immediately find them artificial.

Tell a joke, and if you tell the audience to laugh, they’ll be less inclined to.

Flow, which we’ve mentioned many times, is a highly efficient and engrossed state: when you are fully immersed, if you suddenly ask yourself, “Am I in flow?” at that moment, you’ve already exited flow.

There’s also the recently popular “relaxed vibe,” whose definition is a state of simply not caring. Today, the “relaxed vibe” is trending, with many deliberately pursuing “relaxed vibe outfits,” “relaxed vibe makeup,” and countless guides. Yet, can this still be called a true relaxed vibe?

Social relationships like prestige, trust, authority, respect, and love are also essential by-products; they are not rooted in yourself but deeply embedded in the perceptions of others.

You can buy the most expensive bed, but you cannot buy a night of good sleep; you can hire a hundred highly educated employees, but you cannot buy their loyalty. Superior states are often not prey, but rather birds in the forest: if you deliberately pursue them, they flutter away; if you meticulously plant trees, they might choose to perch there themselves.

Ordinary by-products are incidental gains; essential by-products, however, can only be obtained unintentionally.

Why Direct Pursuit Is Counterproductive #

Why can’t essential by-products be directly pursued? Let’s first examine the states that occur within yourself.

In 1987, American psychologist Daniel Wegner and colleagues conducted a famous experiment [3]. They asked participants to not think of a white bear for five minutes, ringing a bell if they did. The result was that not a single person could do it, ringing the bell at least once per minute on average. Wegner later proposed the “ironic process theory” to explain this phenomenon [4]: when you try to control your thoughts by saying “don’t think,” two processes are actually running simultaneously in your brain: one is responsible for seeking other thoughts, while the other monitors “am I still thinking about the white bear?”

The problem is that for the monitoring process to confirm you haven’t thought of the white bear, it must constantly retrieve it for comparison. Thus, the white bear perpetually lingers at the threshold of your consciousness.

The more you try to control, the more diligent the monitoring, and the further away your goal becomes.

Insomnia follows this very structure. The thought “I must fall asleep” is itself evidence of wakefulness. Sleep requires the withdrawal of consciousness, the relinquishing of control – yet the insomniac is precisely using “control” to pursue “relinquishing control.”

Happiness is the same! The British philosopher John Stuart Mill famously said: “Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness” [5].

In 2011, American psychologist Iris Mauss’s team found that people who overly prioritize happiness tend to be less happy, and this effect is particularly pronounced in favorable circumstances where they have the most reason to feel happy [6]. The underlying mechanism is identical to the “white bear effect”: those who overly prioritize happiness set a standard for themselves and then constantly monitor “am I happy enough right now?” – once monitored, a comparison is made; once compared, a sense of gap naturally arises.

Remember Mill’s words. They apply to all the most precious states that occur within you: only by forgetting yourself can you reach those realms.

Now let’s look at things that can only be determined by others.

The company convenes a meeting, demanding employees demonstrate a spirit of ownership; the boss, on one hand, extensively boasts about their achievements, while on the other, deliberately adopts an approachable demeanor; employee representatives then take turns on stage to declare their loyalty… Does this truly earn trust, prestige, and respect?

What you likely harvest is merely a poll result with zero information. Forcing others to express their views only yields shoddy performances.

Prestige, trust, and respect—these judgments are valuable precisely because they are difficult to fake.

And the “audience” has long evolved a radar for spotting fakes. Think about it: if someone is good to you, you’re certainly not just concerned with “what they did,” but rather “why they did it.” Once you sense they’re doing it for show, the more they do, the more severely you penalize them. As soon as others detect your excessive craving for their admiration, they will regard that very “excessive craving” as negative evidence.

Demanding respect is the quickest way to lose it.

If the cost is high enough or the punishment severe enough, others can indeed feign giving you prestige, but it is ultimately a counterfeit. Deliberately pursuing prestige, you get attention and flattery; pursuing authority, you get obedience and silence; pursuing trust, you get temporary cooperation under surveillance… One hundred people genuinely applauding, versus one hundred people applauding at gunpoint, may produce identical acoustic signals, but their social realities are profoundly different.

Power lies in others not daring to defy you; true authority, however, lies in you not needing to make them fear you at all.

In short, internally, directly pursuing desirable states leads to self-monitoring, which dissipates the desired state; externally, direct pursuit yields false performances, contaminating genuine evidence.

In fact, it’s the same principle—

Desirable things are all properties concerning the “entire process” – sleep concerns your state of consciousness, natural expression concerns your pure motives, prestige concerns your conduct over many years – directly pursuing them is tantamount to inserting foreign objects into this process: an overly self-conscious self, a rigid metric, a shrewd calculation. Once the process is interfered with, the desirable things nurtured within it wither away.

For these most precious things, the very path to obtaining them is an indispensable part of their definition.

Some Essential By-products Everyone Desires #

Aligning with the principle of essential by-products, let’s look at a few more examples—

One is inspiration and creativity. You cannot command yourself to “now, immediately produce a good idea.” Good ideas are like groundwater; you don’t draw them directly, but rather patiently dig a well – when the well reaches a certain depth, clear springs will emerge.

Su Shi once discussed calligraphy: “If one has no intention of excellence in the beginning of writing, it will be excellent” [7]. When writing, if you don’t deliberately strive for excellence, you can achieve perfection; but if you pick up the brush with the thought, “this piece must be passed down,” every stroke becomes calculated, and the characters lose their spirit.

Lu You, at eighty-four, taught his son about writing poetry, saying the same thing: “If you truly wish to learn poetry, the effort lies outside of poetry itself.”

Another is entrepreneurial wealth. The British economist John Kay’s 2010 book Obliquity examined a large number of companies and proposed: the most profitable companies are often not those that constantly talk about profit [8].

Why? Because profit is a vote of confidence cast by customers with their money. In 1950, George W. Merck, president of pharmaceutical giant Merck, stated in a speech: “Medicine is for the people, not for the profits; as long as we remember this, profits will follow” [9].

Another is love. If you force someone to love you, questioning them daily with “do you love me or not?”, their affection will inevitably diminish – what you pursue is no longer love, but obedience. Only what is voluntary and spontaneous is true love. Others love you only because you are lovable.

Therefore, when in a relationship, one must never fixate on “the relationship itself,” constantly inspecting it: “Is our relationship normal? Do you not love me as much anymore?” As we discussed when talking about the “third object,” a good relationship is not about two people gazing at each other, but rather both looking together at a “third object.”

The Oblique Path: Indirectly Pursuing Essential Goals #

Since the most desirable things cannot be directly pursued, how then can we obtain them? The answer is the title of John Kay’s book: Obliquity – or, as an ancient Chinese saying goes, “yield and be preserved” (曲则全).

If you sincerely desire to obtain an essential by-product, what you should directly pursue is the deeper thing behind that by-product.

Behind prestige is sustained action and contribution; behind trust are promises fulfilled time and again; behind good sleep is the anxious relinquishing of control; behind flow, it’s a challenge whose difficulty is precisely at the edge of your ability.

There’s a follow-up to the study mentioned earlier, “the more you pursue happiness, the less happy you are.” A 2015 cross-cultural study by American psychologist Brett Ford in collaboration with Mauss found that for us East Asians, conversely, if we profess to pursue happiness, we are more likely to achieve it [10]. Why? Because for East Asians, pursuing happiness typically implies practical actions, such as spending more time with family or helping friends – we interpret “pursuing happiness” as “doing other beneficial things,” and as a result, happiness naturally arrives as a by-product.

You can entirely and justifiably desire prestige, love, and wealth, but you must take an indirect approach. Elster himself specifically distinguished: you can certainly hope to be admired, and you can certainly foresee that your actions will bring admiration – as long as you do not do it solely for the purpose of gaining admiration [11].

It’s not “I want to appear brave,” but “this matter is worth risking for”;

It’s not “I want to be a trustworthy person,” but “I cannot fail this commitment”;

It’s not “I want to be a prestigious writer,” but “this issue must be clearly explained.”

Never fixate solely on yourself; instead, cast your gaze towards an object more important than your self-image.

The Realm of Wu Wei: The Wisdom and Effort of Not Striving #

In fact, this “not directly pursuing” skill, we Chinese have delved deeply into it for over two millennia. Wse analyzed a book by Canadian sinologist Edward Slingerland called Trying Not to Try [12], which provides an excellent framework.

Slingerland interprets pre-Qin intellectual history as four answers to the same paradox: humanity’s highest state is wu wei, which means being natural, effortless, and cultivating a “not trying” attitude – yet, how does one try to achieve this state of “not trying”?

Confucius’s method is “practice” (lian, try hard not to try). Through decades of deliberate training in rites, music, archery, charioteering, and more, rules are integrated into the body until one can “follow one’s heart’s desires without overstepping the bounds” – when deliberate training reaches its peak, one can attain naturalness.

Laozi’s method, conversely, is “subtract” (jian, stop trying). “In the pursuit of knowledge, one gains daily; in the pursuit of the Way, one loses daily.” The cleverness, performances, and comparisons that society teaches you are all foreign objects inserted into the process; cultivation is the act of stripping away these foreign objects layer by layer.

Mencius’s method is “nurture” (yang, try, but not too hard). Mencius believed that the sprouts of goodness exist in everyone’s heart; you cannot “pull up sprouts to help them grow” (揠苗助长), but only, like a farmer, loosen the soil and water them, allowing them to grow naturally. A farmer does not directly create crops but creates suitable conditions for their growth.

Zhuangzi, on the other hand, simply abandoned the problem itself; his method is “forget” (wang, forget about trying). Butcher Ding carving an ox, his skill had reached such mastery that he “met it with his spirit rather than looking with his eyes,” forgetting the knife, forgetting the ox, and forgetting himself, simply following his sensations – this is an excellent example of “letting the monitoring process off duty.”

While each of the four schools had its own focus and didn’t fully persuade one another, and there’s no perfect solution among them, they shared a common consensus: wu wei brings “De” (virtue or charisma), which is a convincing appeal. A virtuous person is natural and uncalculating, so others find them trustworthy and are willing to approach, cooperate, and even follow them. A virtuous ruler can command voluntary obedience without threats or rewards, thereby elevating individual states into a harmonious social order.

This is why all the pre-Qin masters wanted to achieve wu wei, and they all knew it couldn’t be seized directly; an indirect approach was necessary. They also unanimously agreed: obliquity is not equivalent to passive inaction. Confucius’s practice, Laozi’s subtraction, Mencius’s nurturing, and Zhuangzi’s forgetting – each requires many years of effort. If you do nothing, that is not wu wei, but rather doing nothing at all.

So you might ask, what if I set all the conditions right, but the by-product still doesn’t arrive? What then?

Let it not come, then. Whether it comes or not is a matter of luck; whether you do something or not, that is within your control.

You should choose things that are worth pursuing even if the by-product never arrives and no one applauds. You should know that some people do these things without regret. Then, you might ask, if there truly is a reward, who should it be preferentially given to?

The subtlety lies in this “not expecting” being precisely the only signal that can pass the “anti-counterfeit radar”: the more genuinely you contribute without seeking prestige, the more your actions are qualified to become solid evidence of prestige.

Broadly speaking, that “good things can only be by-products” is not a flaw in the world, but its fortune. If everything could be directly contended for, love openly priced, respect bought on order, prestige allocated by budget, with everyone scrambling to throw themselves onto the altar of “Moloch,” how unbearable that sight would be.

“Deliberate beauty is not true beauty” – don’t you think this very design holds a profound aesthetic?

Xin Qiji said: “After searching for her a thousand times in the crowd, suddenly turning back, she was there, where the lights were dim.” He also said: “Deliberately seeking spring, it refuses to scent; the scent is where it is not sought.” Both express this same sentiment.

In 1101, Su Shi was gravely ill in Changzhou. On his deathbed, two friends reminded him not to forget to go to the Western Pure Land – Su Shi ultimately uttered the last four words of his life [13]:

“Exerting effort, one errs.”

Indeed, if you desperately strive to pursue something, you will fall far short.

The deepest mercy of this world lies precisely in not having priced all the most precious things as prizes.

Notes #

[1] Baron, Kelly Glazer, Sabra Abbott, Nancy Jao, Natalie Manalo, and Rebecca Mullen. “Orthosomnia: Are Some Patients Taking the Quantified Self Too Far?” Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine 13, no. 2 (2017): 351–354.

[2] Elster, Jon. Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Chapter 2, “States That Are Essentially By-Products.”

[3] Wegner, Daniel M., David J. Schneider, Samuel R. Carter, and Teri L. White. “Paradoxical Effects of Thought Suppression.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53, no. 1 (1987): 5–13.

[4] Wegner, Daniel M. “Ironic Processes of Mental Control.” Psychological Review 101, no. 1 (1994): 34–52.

[5] Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1873. Chapter V.

[6] Mauss, Iris B., Maya Tamir, Craig L. Anderson, and Nicole S. Savino. “Can Seeking Happiness Make People Unhappy? Paradoxical Effects of Valuing Happiness.” Emotion 11, no. 4 (2011): 807–815.

[7] Su Shi: “Comments on Cursive Script,” in Kong Fanli (ed.), Su Shi Wen Ji (Collected Works of Su Shi), Vol. 69 (Colophons), Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1986.

[8] Kay, John. Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly. London: Profile Books, 2010.

[9] Merck, George W. Speech at the Medical College of Virginia at Richmond, December 1, 1950.

[10] Ford, Brett Q., Julia O. Dmitrieva, Daniel Heller, Yulia Chentsova-Dutton, Igor Grossmann, Maya Tamir, Yukiko Uchida, et al. “Culture Shapes Whether the Pursuit of Happiness Predicts Higher or Lower Well-Being.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 144, no. 6 (2015): 1053–1062.

[11] Elster, Jon. “States That Are Essentially By-Products.” Social Science Information 20, no. 3 (1981): 431–473.

[12] Slingerland, Edward. Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity. New York: Crown, 2014; Chinese translation: Edward Slingerland, trans. Shi Guoqiang, Wei Yu Wu Wei: Dang Xian Dai Ke Xue Yu Shang Zhong Guo Zhi Hui (Action and Non-Action: When Modern Science Meets Chinese Wisdom), Beijing: Modern Press, 2018.

[13] Fu Zao: Dongpo Jinian Lu (Chronicle of Su Dongpo). Zhou Hui: Qingbo Zazhi (Qingbo Miscellaneous Records) from the Song Dynasty also records this event, mutually corroborating Dongpo Jinian Lu. See also Luo Zhenyu, Wenming Zhi Lü (Journey of Civilization), 1101 AD: Farewell to Mr. Dongpo.