Riding Bareback on a Fire Horse

Why everyone is sprinting toward burnout and calling it productivity

There's an old Taoist concept called Wu Wei. It translates roughly as "non-doing" or "effortless action." Western ears hear that and immediately think it means laziness. Sit on the couch. Do nothing. Let the world happen.

That's not what it means.

Wu Wei is about aligning yourself with the natural current of things so your effort actually counts. Think of a surfer. The wave does the work. The surfer's job is positioning, timing, and balance. Nobody would look at Kelly Slater carving a 12-foot barrel and say he's being lazy. But he's also not fighting the ocean.

Most people in 2026 are fighting the ocean.

The Fire Horse Problem

I keep seeing the same pattern everywhere. Founders, managers, teachers trying to leave the classroom, corporate professionals building side projects. They're all doing the same thing: running flat out, every single day, on a horse that's literally on fire, and wondering why they feel burnt.

The calendar is full. The to-do list never shrinks. There's a dopamine hit from checking things off, replying to emails within 90 seconds, having 47 tabs open, scheduling meetings about meetings. It feels productive. The body is in motion. Things are happening.

But here's the uncomfortable question: what actually moved forward?

Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching: "The master does nothing, yet nothing is left undone." Read that again. It's not about doing nothing. It's about doing the right thing with such precision that waste disappears.

Most "productive" people I know are spectacularly busy and functionally stuck. They've confused activity with progress. The fire horse looks impressive. Sparks flying, hooves pounding, mane ablaze. But it's running in circles in a paddock.

Busyness Is a Status Symbol That's Killing Us

Somewhere along the way, "I'm so busy" became a flex. Ask someone how they're going and the answer is almost always: "Busy. So busy." Said with a mixture of exhaustion and pride, like a soldier showing off a wound.

The Taoist tradition sees this differently. Chuang Tzu tells the story of Cook Ding, a butcher who carved an ox so perfectly that his knife never dulled. He'd been doing it for 19 years and the blade was still sharp as the day it was forged. His secret? He didn't hack at the meat. He found the natural spaces between the joints and the knife passed through without resistance.

"I follow the natural structure," Cook Ding said. "I never touch the ligaments or tendons, let alone the bones."

That's the opposite of how most people work. We hack. We grind. We brute force our way through problems and then celebrate how hard it was. The knife is dull. We're exhausted. And somehow that's the badge of honour.

The Space Between the Joints

So what does this actually look like in practice? In 2026, with AI tools that can think, write, research, code, and create alongside you?

It looks like space.

The most productive people I've met recently aren't working more hours. They're working fewer hours with more clarity. They've stopped trying to do everything and started asking a better question: What's the one thing that actually matters today?

Then they use every tool available to clear the path to that one thing.

AI isn't a replacement for thinking. It's a replacement for the 4 hours of busywork that sits between you and the thinking. The research you don't need to do manually. The first draft you don't need to stare at a blank page for. The data analysis that used to take a weekend. The email responses that drain your creative energy before 10am.

When you offload the mechanical work, something interesting happens. You get space. And in that space, you find flow.

Flow Is the Real Currency

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying flow states. That feeling when time disappears, when you're fully absorbed in meaningful work, when your skill level perfectly matches the challenge in front of you. He found that people in flow are orders of magnitude more productive and creative than people who are just "working hard."

The Taoists knew this thousands of years earlier. They just called it something different.

Wu Wei isn't about being passive. It's about removing the friction that prevents you from entering flow. The endless context switching. The notification that pulls you out of deep work. The meeting that could've been a message. The report that nobody reads. The performative productivity that looks good on LinkedIn but produces nothing of substance.

Every one of those things is a ligament. Cook Ding wouldn't touch them. He'd find the gap and slide through.

The AI Paradox

Here's what's strange about how most people use AI right now. They use it to do MORE. More content. More emails. More tasks. More output. They've taken the most powerful productivity tool in human history and used it to ride the fire horse faster.

That's insane.

The opportunity isn't to produce more. It's to produce the right things and reclaim the rest of your time for actual thinking, creativity, and the deep work that moves the needle.

A teacher trying to build a course doesn't need AI to write 50 lesson plans. They need AI to handle the formatting, research, and structure so they can spend their energy on the parts that actually require a human brain. The stories. The connections. The moments that make students lean forward instead of checking their phones.

A founder doesn't need AI to send 10,000 cold emails. They need AI to handle the operations so they can spend Tuesday afternoon walking by the river, letting their subconscious work on the problem that's been stuck for three weeks.

The walk by the river is the productive act. The 10,000 emails are the fire horse.

The Water Principle

Lao Tzu was obsessed with water. "Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it."

Water doesn't fight the rock. It goes around it. Given enough time, it goes through it. It always finds the path of least resistance, and it always wins.

The modern equivalent: stop trying to do everything by force. Stop grinding 14-hour days and calling it hustle. Stop wearing exhaustion like a medal.

Instead, find the gaps. Use the tools. Create space for the work that actually matters. Let the mechanical stuff flow to machines that are literally designed for mechanical stuff.

Then do less, better.

Practical Wu Wei

This isn't just philosophy. Here's what it looks like day to day:

Morning: Don't start with email. Don't start with Slack. Don't start with the news. Start with the one thing. The creative act. The strategic decision. The deep work. You have about 2 to 3 hours of peak cognitive performance each morning. Spending it on email replies is like using a Michelin-star kitchen to microwave leftovers.

Delegation to AI: Every task that doesn't require your unique human judgment, creativity, or relationship skills should be questioned. Can this be automated? Can this be drafted by AI and refined by me in 10 minutes instead of written from scratch in 2 hours? Can this meeting be replaced by a brief that an AI helped me structure?

Scheduled emptiness: Block time in your calendar for nothing. Literally nothing. Walk. Sit. Stare out the window. This is where the ideas come from. This is where the connections happen. Every major breakthrough in history came from someone who had space to think, not from someone who had back-to-back meetings from 8am to 6pm.

Say no more: The Taoist concept of "pu" means "the uncarved block." Potential in its purest form. Every time you say yes to something that doesn't matter, you're carving away a piece of that potential. Protect the block.

The Paradox of Less

There's a beautiful contradiction at the heart of all this. By doing less, you accomplish more. By slowing down, you move faster. By creating empty space, you fill it with better things.

This isn't motivational poster stuff. It's physics. A focused beam of light can cut steel. Diffused light just lights a room. Same energy, wildly different results.

The people who will thrive in the AI age aren't the ones who figure out how to produce 100x more content, send 100x more messages, and fill 100x more hours. They're the ones who figure out how to aim.

Get off the fire horse. Let it burn itself out. Find the water. Find the gaps between the joints. Find the wave.

Then ride it.