Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism
Aug 24, 2026 · 30 min · 11 segments
Today I'd like to talk with you about something almost everyone treats as a weakness, and which I think has been badly misunderstood: the fact that we care, often a great deal, about what other people…
Chen LiHost
It is the middle of the afternoon, twelve people around a long table, and someone is presenting a plan that has a problem in it.
It is a real one, and she's almost certain she is right about it, and she has been holding it for twenty minutes now, waiting for the right moment to say it.
Will it look as though she is positioning herself? Is this the kind of thing that gets remembered later? Is she certain enough? And each pass through those calculations moves the moment slightly further away until it has gone.
Twenty minutes on, a colleague raises the same objection in fewer words and with less evidence.
She says something agreeable about the revision, and then she drives home and replays the whole afternoon three or four times with a low, familiar frustration she cannot quite name because the thing that stopped her was not cowardice exactly, and it was not stupidity, and she cannot find the word for what it was.
Let's stay with her for a moment before we do anything clever with it because I suspect nearly everyone listening has been in that chair.
And here is the first thing I want to say because a great deal of the advice on this subject begins by making you the problem, and I think that is both unkind and wrong.
A person alone could not bring down large game, could not defend a camp through the night, could not survive an injury or an illness or a hard winter.
It is the middle of the afternoon, twelve people around a long table, and someone is presenting a plan that has a problem in it.
It is a real one, and she's almost certain she is right about it, and she has been holding it for twenty minutes now, waiting for the right moment to say it.
Will it look as though she is positioning herself? Is this the kind of thing that gets remembered later? Is she certain enough? And each pass through those calculations moves the moment slightly further away until it has gone.
Twenty minutes on, a colleague raises the same objection in fewer words and with less evidence.
She says something agreeable about the revision, and then she drives home and replays the whole afternoon three or four times with a low, familiar frustration she cannot quite name because the thing that stopped her was not cowardice exactly, and it was not stupidity, and she cannot find the word for what it was.
Let's stay with her for a moment before we do anything clever with it because I suspect nearly everyone listening has been in that chair.
And here is the first thing I want to say because a great deal of the advice on this subject begins by making you the problem, and I think that is both unkind and wrong.
A person alone could not bring down large game, could not defend a camp through the night, could not survive an injury or an illness or a hard winter.
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