Why Working Harder Stopped Working | (#093) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Welcome to the Beyond Success Podcast: Psychology and Philosophy for Achievers on the Inner Life of Success, and I’m your host, David Tian. Alysa Liu was the best young figure skater in America, and quitting was the smartest thing she ever did. Let me give you the first half of her story.

She wins the U.S. national championship at 13, the youngest ever to do it. She’s the first American woman to land a quadruple Lutz in competition. She’d already landed a triple axel at 12, the youngest skater in the world to do that on the international stage.

Every box that you would check for a prodigy, she checked early. She goes to the Beijing Olympics in 2022, 16 years old, and finishes sixth, sixth at the Olympics at 16. For most people on earth, that’s the ceiling of what a human body can do. But then she stopped, walked away, burned out, done, wanted to be a normal teenager for once. Retired at 16. [00:56.5]

Now, here’s how most people would predict her comeback story goes—the prodigy steps away, gets hungry again, comes back, and hustles twice as hard, and the comeback is built on more. More hours, more pressure, more discipline. That’s the story we tell about every comeback. It’s the story most of you have been living, but it’s not what happened.

She took two years completely off. She came back in 2024 and she came back on her own terms with her own music, her own clothes, her own coaches, her own hairstyle. She built a team around how she really wants to work instead of forcing herself into how she was supposed to work or how other people told her she was supposed to work. After just one year back, she wins the 2025 world championship. The year after that, at the 2026 Olympics, she wins gold, the first American woman to do that in 24 years. [01:51.7]

So, sit with the two halves of that. Phase 1, all-out effort, everything that discipline could give, peaks at sixth place. Phase 2, after stepping away for years and changing how she related to the whole endeavor, gold, same skater, same body, more or less. The variable that changed wasn’t how hard she worked. By some measures, she worked less. What changed was her relationship to the work itself, to the activity itself, to the thing that she was doing itself.

After she skated and got gold, she said this: “I’m so proud of the resilience I showed. I’m just really happy I was able to go out there and do what I love and enjoy it.” Listen to what she didn’t say. She didn’t say she finally outworked everyone with more discipline. Instead, she said she enjoyed it. She did what she loved out there on the biggest stage in her sport and the gold medal came with it. You can’t schedule what she found. It doesn’t show up because you put it on the calendar and then attacked it. That’s the whole problem. The thing that finally produced the gold medal is something more discipline can’t get you. [03:05.8]

Here’s what I want to give you in this episode: there’s a ceiling on the discipline formula, and more discipline won’t get you through it. Past a certain point, the highest performance doesn’t come from effort, it comes from inner alignment, and maybe the strange part is that this isn’t some new finding. Ancient Chinese philosophy worked this out about 2,500 years ago, and modern psychology basically rediscovered the same thing and gave it a new name. They call it “flow.” By the end of this episode, you’ll understand what that ceiling is, why it’s there and what’s on the other side of it.

Now, let me tell you why this matters for you specifically. You probably ran the discipline formula and it probably worked. That’s not in question. It built what it built, what it got you, and you’re probably still running it, because why would you stop running the plan that worked? But if you’re honest, the returns aren’t what they used to be, right? [04:04.2]

You put in the same effort, or maybe more now, but you get less back than you used to, and some part of you already suspects that the answer here isn’t just “try harder,” and you’re right about that. Here’s what’s at stake—if you don’t see this, if you don’t understand this, if you don’t take it to heart, you will keep pushing harder into the same wall, but that wall won’t move, and every year you get a little less for a little more. If you do see this, though, you’ll stop hitting the wall completely, and you will reach what’s been sitting on the other side of it the whole time.

This goes completely against the common misconception that top elite performance always comes from working harder or from harder effort, or more effort. Beneath that is an assumption that most people don’t examine or don’t even know about, that effort and results track each other the same way at every level, that twice the effort gets you something like twice the result, and that is true all the way up. But it’s not true. It doesn’t. It’s false. [05:09.6]

Discipline is excellent for getting started, for getting yourself past the beginner stage, but as you get closer to the top, that relationship inverts. Forcing produces more mediocre results, but aligned action produces the extraordinary elite ones. The formula isn’t wrong as much as it is incomplete.

Now, I opened with Alysa Liu, but I want to be clear that this isn’t an episode about figure skating or anything. Her story is just a fresh, clean example of something much bigger. If it were just one skater, maybe it wouldn’t be worth your time. It’s worth your time because the same pattern shows up everywhere you look once you know how to look for it.

You see it in surgeons. You see it in musicians, elite, the top musicians. You see it in the top financial traders, in soldiers under fire, in the best riders, in chess players, and founders building billion-dollar companies. Different worlds, different skills. Maybe on the surface no connection to each other, but across all of them, at the highest levels, the same thing keeps turning up. [06:13.4]

The people doing the best work of their lives describe it all the same way and it probably isn’t the way you would expect. This pattern has been documented for many decades. It is not a hunch and it’s not some motivational story. Let’s open the aperture and look at what these people actually have in common.

The best place to start is probably with the man who spent his entire career studying exactly this. His name was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He was a renowned psychologist and he gave over 30 years of his life to this one topic. He wanted to know what people are doing in the moments they’re performing at their absolute peak and in the moments they report being happiest.

What he found is that those two things overlap. The state where people do their best to work is also the state where they feel most alive, and he gave it a label—he called it “flow.” [07:07.3]

Here’s what people describe when they’re in flow. The first thing is that the action and your awareness of the action merge. Normally, there’s you and then there’s the thing you’re doing, and then there’s a little voice narrating the gap between them, but in the state of flow, that gap closes. You’re not watching yourself doing it. You’re just doing it.

The second thing is that your sense of self drops away, that self-consciousness, the self-monitoring, the part of you keeping score. All that goes quiet. Third, time distorts. An hour passes as if it were 10 minutes or 10 minutes stretches out long.

The fourth thing, the one that matters most for us in this episode, is that the effort feels easy, easeful, not effortless in the sense of lazy. The work may be objectively hard, but it doesn’t feel like forcing. It feels like the activity is moving through you rather than being dragged out of you or you having to force it, or push your way through. [08:13.5]

You get the same report from people who have nothing to do with each other. A surgeon in the middle of the hardest procedure of her career describes this. A musician at the top of his game playing the best he’s ever played describes it. A founder looking back on the stretch of months when the best decisions of his life or career somehow just came to him describes this as well. Different worlds, but the same experience, almost word for word.

Now, I want to highlight this. This state is not produced by trying harder. You can’t force your way into flow. Effort, the kind you’re probably good at, is not the lever. The lever is a different relationship to the activity itself. The surgeon isn’t grinding her teeth harder than the surgeon who’s struggling. Instead, she’s relating to the activity in a different way. [09:07.3]

Of course, it’s not just those three examples. You can look at military operators. They describe how they functioned under fire in the moments they performed beyond what they thought they were capable of, and it will be a similar description. If you look at financial traders recounting their best calls, the ones that look like instinct, same thing.

Nobel Prize–winning, award-winning writers will tell you about the rare days when the writing simply flows, when they’re almost transcribing something rather than composing it. Chess grandmasters remember specific games they play that went this way. That might have been years ago, but they remember them because of how it felt to play them. [09:46.6]

None of these people white-knuckled their way through it. Not one of them got into that state by pushing harder. For most of them, access to that state came only after some kind of deep inner work, and again, this is at the highest level, so if you’re at the beginner’s level of anything, you probably will need to apply discipline and willpower to get you started. But the highest levels, this is the state of excellence, and this generally comes only after some kind of deep inner work.

Sometimes the person chose it, they went looking deliberately for a different way of operating, but sometimes life chose it for them. Something broke apart or fell apart, or forced them to stop doing it the old way, and only on the other side of that did the new way, a flow, open up, which raises the obvious question, what is this state, actually?

The truth is, somebody answered that a very long time ago. What Csikszentmihalyi called flow and spent over 30 years documenting ancient Chinese philosophers described about 2,500 years earlier, and in a lot more depth and with a moral dimension, and of course, they had a name for it, too. They called it “wu wei.” [10:59.7]

Now, the moment you try to translate that, you run into trouble. The usual translation is non-action. Sometimes you’ll see effortless action in more modern texts. Both of these miss it in a way that matters. Non-action makes it sound like you’re doing nothing, like you’re sitting on a cushion waiting for the universe to handle things. That’s not it at all. Effortless action is closer, but it makes it sound like some kind of trick, like you found the lazy shortcut. Okay, so that’s also not it.

The better way to put it is this: wu wei is acting in accord with the nature of the thing. You’re fully in the action. You’re working, but you’ve stopped fighting the grain of what’s in front of you and started moving with the grain. There’s a story the ancient Daoists told to get this across. It’s from the text, the Zhuangzi. This is in Chapter 3. [11:55.2]

There’s a cook. His name is Cook Ding and his job is butchering an ox. Okay, so he’s the top chef here. He’s so good at it that watching him is like watching a dance, and the king brings him to the court and questions him about the secret to his great skill in carving an ox. Cook Ding says that his knife moves through the animal and it makes a sound that sounds like music. The blade never catches. He never hacks, never forces, so that the Lord watching him is amazed and asks, “How have you gotten this skill?”

The cook puts down his knife and then explains. He says, “When I started, all I could see was the whole ox in front of me, this big solid thing to be hacked through, but after a few years,” he says, “I stopped seeing the ox as a single mass, and now,” he says, “I don’t even look with my eyes. I go in where there’s already an opening. I follow the natural lines, the spaces between the joints, the hollows that are already there. I never touch a ligament or a tendon, let alone a bone.” [13:00.8]

And here’s a line that does the work. He says, “A good cook changes his knife once a year because he cuts. An ordinary cook changes his knife once a month because he hacks. But my knife, he says, I’ve had for 19 years, and it has cut up thousands of oxen, but the blade is as sharp as the day it came off the grindstone, because I don’t force it through the meat. I find the place where there’s no resistance and I move there.”

Sit with that, because that’s the whole thing. The master isn’t strong. He isn’t grinding. He’s not stronger than the others, not hustling harder. He’s not the hardest worker in the kitchen, sweating and sawing away. Instead, he’s attuned. He’s so deeply read into the structure of what’s in front of him that he moves where there is an opening and the result looks like no effort at all, and his tool never wears out, because he never abuses it. [13:56.2]

This isn’t passivity. It’s not giving up. It’s not going soft. It’s not quietism. It’s not detaching and letting things slide. In fact, in many ways, it’s the opposite. Wu wei is the most skilled form of action and being there is. It’s what’s left when you remove the forcing but keep the skill.

The Dao De Jing, the foundational Daoist text, puts it in a line that sounds like a paradox, but isn’t. It says the Dao does nothing and yet nothing is left undone. Nothing is forced, and everything gets done. [14:32.8]

Sometimes, the real problem isn’t more effort or more motivation. It’s knowing the right direction. A lot of people listening to this podcast are capable and driven. Things still look fine on paper, but life still feels strangely flat. When that happens, more advice usually isn’t the answer. Clarity is.

I’ve put together a short assessment that takes about two minutes. It’s simply a way to see which area deserves your attention most right now, whether that’s relationships, decision-making, or how pressure is being handled day to day. Based on your responses, you’ll be sent a short set of master classes related to that area.

If that sounds useful, you can find it at DTPhD.com/quiz. That’s “dtphd.com/quiz.”

These men were writing in the 4th century BCE, no labs, no data, no 30 year studies, but they described precisely what over 40 years of modern flow research keeps confirming. This isn’t some exotic Eastern idea that you file away as foreign or oriental, and it isn’t new either. Every serious tradition that ever studied mastery anywhere eventually found the same thing. If it’s that universal, the question becomes personal. Why does your formula stop working? Why does the discipline that built everything that you’ve built suddenly start giving you less? [15:57.4]

But, first, let me defend the formula, because I don’t want you to hear me trashing discipline. At the climbing stage, discipline is exactly the right approach. Think about the young founder in the first years of the company or the young athlete learning the fundamentals, or the young analyst grinding, hustling to get good. For all of them, effort is the bottleneck at the beginning. The thing standing between them and the next level really is just hard work, consistency, hours, reps, showing up when they don’t feel like it, all of that.

At that stage, the formula isn’t actually just fine. It’s correct, right? So, more effort at that stage genuinely produces more results. You ran that and it worked, and you were right to run it. Okay, but here’s what happens later. You actually get good. You reach or approach the mastery stage, but at the mastery stage, the bottleneck changes. Okay, so most people don’t notice this because of how rare it is, but also because the formula worked for so long that it’s natural to assume that it always will. [16:57.7]

The thing that’s now in your way, however, is no longer insufficient effort. You’ve got the effort. Effort is maybe the one thing you’ve never been short on. What’s in your way now is something else entirely. What’s in your way now is the very part of you that drives all that effort, the controlling part, the performing part, the achievement-seeking part, the part of you that powered through the whole climb.

That part is brilliant at climbing. It’s relentless. It’s disciplined. It grips the wheel and it doesn’t let go. But now that’s the problem, because the qualities that mastery now requires are qualities that that part of you can’t produce or aren’t very good at.

Let’s be more specific about what those qualities are. Here are some examples. Real, true curiosity, the kind where you actually really want to know sincerely, not the kind that’s scanning for some kind of advantage. Sustained attention to the work or activity itself, staying with it instead of rushing it toward the result. [18:04.2]

The willingness to listen to the material or the people in front of you instead of imposing your plan on them. The cook listening to the ox instead of hacking through it. An experimentation that isn’t fenced in by the frameworks that you already know and trust, the ones that got you here. The controlling achievement-seeking part can’t do any of that. It’s not very good at any of that.

It’s very difficult for that part to be that type of curious, because it has already decided what matters. It’s hard for it to listen that way, because it’s too busy directing. It’s hard for it to experiment freely, because it only trusts what’s already worked for so many years, so the harder that it grips, the more it actually locks you out of the exact state that will produce your best work and give you your best inspiration. [18:56.5]

Now, if you’ve listened to the last episode, you already have the concepts for this. We talked about the two selves. We talked about the manager, the part of you running the operation, keeping everything controlled, keeping you performing, and we talked about how that manager, when it dominates, holds down a whole set of capacities.

It keeps the exiled parts locked away and it keeps the qualities that those exiled parts carry locked away with them, the curiosity, the openness, the spontaneity, the adventurousness, the capacity to be fully in something without having to manage it. Those capacities don’t disappear per se. Instead, they get held down, suppressed, and then repressed. When they do get released, they come back online, and that only happens when the exiles are unburdened, when the parts that you locked away get to come back. [19:50.1]

So, the inner work is not a separate project from the performance problem. It’s not a nice-to-have that you’ll get to once the real work is done. The inner work is the performance work. The thing holding your best output down and the thing holding your inner life down are the same thing. It’s the same over-gripping part doing the same job, but in both places, which means the wall that you keep hitting in your work and the wall that you keep hitting in your personal life are not two separate walls. They are one wall, and you don’t get over it by simply pushing harder, and maybe you have already proven that in your life.

Now let me put this in a language that you’ll recognize maybe more from a completely different corner of the world and time, because I want you to see how many doors lead to the same room—Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins says it at his Business Mastery events to rooms full of people owning companies. He tells them that the number one chokehold on any business is the psychology of the owner. [21:00.7]

That’s it, not the strategy or the spreadsheet. It’s the owner’s own mind, and look at where that comes from. This isn’t some Daoist sage in the 4th century BCE. This isn’t a psychologist with 30 years of data. This is a guy on a stage at a business seminar, a completely different vocabulary, completely different audience, but it’s the same observation. The thing capping your results is not out there. It’s in your mind.

Think about how much this cuts against our instincts. When the numbers stall, where do you look? Probably look at the market or at the team, or the strategy, the capital, the competition, the timing. You look everywhere except the one place Tony Robbins is pointing at, which is the psychology of the person making the decisions—you.

The constraint on the outer result is the inner state, the inner condition of whoever is deciding. And you’ll reorganize the entire company before you’ll look there, right? Because looking there is maybe the one move the controlling part most refuses to make. [22:08.7]

Now you’ve got three witnesses who have never met. The ancient Chinese philosophers described it and called it wu wei. The modern flow researchers measured it and confirmed it, and the elite performers, the ones at the top of every field, they stumble into it, usually by accident, usually only after going harder stopped working for them. And Tony Robbins is just saying the popular version of a thing that is by now about as well established as anything gets.

So, let me close the loop on what this whole three-episode arc has been building toward, because here’s where a lot of people get it backwards. When I say the inner work matters, the achievement-seeking part in you hears something maybe soft, hears, “Slow down. Lower your standards. Want it less. Go sit on a beach and make peace with mediocrity.” That is not what I’m saying, okay? It’s not even close. [23:01.4]

The inner work is not some softer alternative to ambition. It’s not the consolation prize that you accept when you’ve decided to stop competing. Instead, the inner work is the thing that makes your ambition produce something actually worth having. You don’t do this instead of going after the big thing. You do this so that going after the big thing actually gets you there, so that what you get is worth the years that you spent getting it.

The founder who does this work doesn’t slow down. Instead, he starts winning things that he couldn’t reach by going harder. A wall that didn’t move for 10, 20 years of effort now isn’t there anymore, not because he smashed his way through it, but because he stopped approaching it the old way. [23:53.2]

Okay, go back to where we started. Alysa Liu’s two gold medals, they didn’t come from more discipline than she had when she was 16. Instead, they came from a different relationship to the work. The surgeon’s best procedure, the one she’ll remember for the rest of her career, didn’t come from gritting her teeth harder than usual.

The writer’s best book, the founder’s best decade, the run of decisions that looked like genius in hindsight, none of that came from willpower applied harder. All of it came from inner alignment that let the inner capacity flow. The capacity was always in there. The inner work that needs to be done is what prevents you from strangling that capacity.” Okay, that’s the return on the inner work, the ROI on the inner work. It’s not less ambition. It’s more of what the ambition was really for. [24:47.1]

Let me bring the whole thing back together. The discipline formula may have built your climb, and you should respect it for that, but it has a ceiling, maybe an invisible ceiling up till now, and more discipline won’t get you through it. Flow and wu wei describe what’s on the other side of that ceiling, and they’ve been describing it for 2,500 years.

The thing capping you at the top isn’t out there in the market or the competition or in your business plan. It’s internal in your mind. it’s the inner state or inner condition, the thoughts and feelings of the person making the decisions, the psychology of the owner.

Here’s the part I haven’t said directly yet. This isn’t only true of your work. It’s true of your whole life. I know that because I hit the ceiling myself in about the most extreme way someone could hit it. Years ago, I had achieved everything the younger version of me, the teenage adolescent version of me, had ever wanted. I got all of it and more, but I felt nothing really, not the relief I expected, not the arrival, nothing, really. It was empty in a way that I couldn’t explain to anyone, because on paper I had won, but it broke me. I went to a very dark place. [26:03.3]

To summarize it, make a long story short, it was the lowest place there was for me and I came close to not making it, and a friend stepped in at the last moment, and then stayed on my couch on suicide watch for a couple weeks. A while after that, some friends took me on a motorcycle trip through the mountains of Northern Vietnam, even though I did not know how to ride a motorcycle before this.

One evening, I was riding these narrow roads carved into the side of a mountain, a gorge dropping away beside me, the sun going down, and it was beautiful, and I made a decision on the next turn I was going to take myself off the road and off into the sunset, take off into the gorge and end it, right?

So, there was this voice in my head and I want you to hear what this voice was saying, because you might recognize it. It was saying, “Come on, do it, man! Man up!” You know that voice, the one that drove every achievement, right, the warrior achiever, the part that built the climb or powered through the climb at full volume, now turned and pointed at me. [27:05.4]

But then a different thought cut across it: “I want to see her grow up.” It was my goddaughter. She was just two years old then, and I’d spent years helping to care for her, from when she was just really tiny, feeding her, burping her, changing her diapers, that whole thing, and somewhere in those months, for the first time in my life, I felt love flowing out of me that asked for nothing in return, and I couldn’t earn that love. I didn’t need to, and she couldn’t give me anything in return, and it didn’t matter, and I realized she could actually ask for my life if in some kind of weird, messed-up way she needed it, and I would have given it and it would have been okay.

This love was the one thing that my entire achievement operating system had never once produced, not with any of the winning, not with any of the achievements, and that thought is what helped me through to break through to the other side, not willpower. [28:09.1]

I had spent my whole life on willpower and willpower was the thing telling me to get off the road to ride off into the sunset, literally off the mountain. What got me through that wasn’t more force. It was a completely different relationship to my own life. You maybe call it wu wei, at the level of a person.

The forcing couldn’t reach what love reached. The achievement self, the part of me that grips and performs and drives, had no access to it at all before then. It took the parts of me I’d locked away, the exile parts coming back for that to open up, and when it opened, it opened onto a level of meaning and fulfillment, and frankly, a level of work that I didn’t even know was there. It’s the reason I’m talking to you right now. [28:57.0]

So, here’s what’s at stake for you. If you don’t see this, you’ll spend the next decade applying more of what already stopped working. The returns will keep shrinking and you’ll read that shrinking as a signal to hustle harder, because that’s the only move the achievement self really knows.

The ceiling, however, will hold in your work and in your life, and you’ll keep mistaking the wall for proof that you just haven’t pushed hard enough yet, and you’ll throw the best years you have left at a wall that was never going to move that way.

But if you do see it, the work that you’ve been forcing starts to flow and you reach things that effort alone was never going to get you, and it will open up possibilities that you had never even considered that will take you to levels that you didn’t even know were up there, including the parts of a life that can’t be earned, the parts no amount of winning ever buys. [29:54.8]

So, if you recognize yourself in that chokehold, the question is what you do now. This work is real work. It’s rigorous. It’s deliberate. It’s grounded. It’s not a feeling that you wait around for. The rest of this podcast and the practice behind it are where that work actually happens, and that’s where we go from here. 

Thank you so much for listening. David Tian, signing out. [30:22.0]