Ken Liu On How To Slow Down To Do More

Communicate. We tend to mistake deadlines for actual goals. Goals have meaning: solve the client’s problem, craft a good book, find the right answer. Deadlines, on the other hand, are just arbitrary dates. It’s far more important to hit goals than deadlines. When at risk of missing a deadline, it’s better to communicate with whoever has set the deadline to see if the goal can be met by slowing down, rather than rushing to meet the deadline and miss the goal.

As a part of my series about “How to Slow Down To Do More” I had the pleasure to interview Ken Liu.

Ken Liu is an award-winning author of speculative fiction and a futurist. He wrote the Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series in which the heroes are engineers, not wizards, as well as short story collections The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. His most recent book is a new translation of a Daoist classic: Laozi’s Dao De Jing: A New Interpretation for a Transformative Time.

Thank you so much for doing this interview with us! Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to this specific career path?

I’ve walked a rather “crooked” career path — software engineer, corporate lawyer, litigation consultant — before finally ending up as an author. Some will say that it shows a lack of focus, though my preference is to say that the straight route is rarely scenic.

Storytelling is both an artform as well as a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. Stories are how we derive meaning from this brief span of consciousness that we’re gifted between the eternal oblivion both before birth and after death. The universe, being essentially random, has little concern with character arcs or plotlines, but that isn’t how we experience life: we crave a sense of meaning, purpose, having altered the universe for the better — we want to be the hero of our own epic fantasy. In a very real sense, we narrate ourselves into being.

That makes what I do both fun and deeply satisfying, and I can appreciate where I ma now all the more after having taken so many twists and turns in the plot.

According to a 2006 Pew Research Report report, 26% of women and 21% of men feel that they are “always rushed”. Has it always been this way? Can you give a few reasons regarding what you think causes this prevalent feeling of being rushed?

As a storyteller, I think about the big stories we’ve been told, and how they shape our relationship to the world. These fundamental stories are our mythology.

One modern myth is the story of growth, symbolized by the logic of cancer. This is the belief that anything worth doing must follow the curve of ever-accelerating growth: a company that doesn’t grow exponentially is a failure, as is a book or song that doesn’t go viral, as is a calendar that doesn’t need a gatekeeper. When the Red Queen’s race is normalized, as it has been in our society, we feel compelled to constantly accelerate just to stay in the same place.

Another modern myth is the story of social media, symbolized by the fence that divides you from the greener grass. On social media, all your friends are having more fun, earning more money, getting more professional recognition, reaching more of their potential. You know this is an illusion, a result of careful curation or outright lies, that they’re in fact just as anxious and harried as you, but you can’t help but ask: “Why can’t I have that?” And you think maybe something is wrong with you. Maybe you have to work harder, take on more, get it done faster.

Yet another modern myth is the story of missing out, symbolized by all the shows you’ve marked on your streaming service which you’ll never watch. We live in an age of too many choices, in books and TV shows, in brands of cereal, in opportunities for self-improvement. No matter how much we do, we think we’re missing out on the best, and so we compensate by gorging ourselves, by multitasking, by listening to podcasts at double speed while speeding on the highway to our next appointment.

These mythologies are killing us. The more they make us unhappy, the more we think the fault is in ourselves. But they’re just stories. If existing stories are making us unhappy, what we need are better stories.

Based on your experience or research can you explain why being rushed can harm our productivity, health, and happiness?

I’m a big believer in the lessons of experience. Think about your own life: when were you happiest? I would guess the memories that come to mind are moments when you felt no desire to do more than what you were doing, no craving to be anywhere but where you were, no longing other than the wish for the moment to go on. You didn’t want to rush.

We like to think that rushing will give us more moments like that, but that never works. Rushing simply leads to more rushing, and the more you try to save time, the more time slips away.

In Laozi’s Dao De Jing, there’s this verse: “Rushing and chasing, the mind becomes unsettled. Craving and desiring, the heart loses itself on crooked paths.” We need to find our hearts and settle our minds to be happy.

On the flip side, can you give examples of how we can do more, and how our lives would improve if we could slow down?

Let me tackle this from a literary angle. I think rushing is the biggest obstacle to joy in reading.

There’s something deeply paradoxical about writing and reading fiction. What superficially looks like a communicative act — the writer telling the reader a story — is anything but. A communicative act can be measured by the achievement of an objective goal. Take giving directions as an example. To know whether Alice has successfully given directions to Bob, one only has to look at whether Bob has reached his desired destination.

Fiction, however, cannot be judged by such metrics. Is the Iliad a pro-war or anti-war poem? Was Milton of the party of the Devil and didn’t know it? These questions have no answers. Given the same story, different readers will end up in entirely different destinations.

But that doesn’t mean that the writer has failed. For the creation of meaning in fiction is a dance between two parties. The writer has a particular vision of the human condition that motivates her to write a story. But as it is impossible to capture the human condition in words, she can only weave a text that is shaped by her vision, like a house designed by an architect who has a specific view of how people live. The reader then comes along, moves into the house, and must make herself comfortable inside the text. She unpacks her collections of outfits of experience and rearranges the interpretive furniture, sets out her photographs of moral assumptions and cooks her favorite meals of expectations. In short, her experience of this house — her reading of the book — depends on who she is and the effort she puts in. Every reading of a book must necessarily be different, in the same way that every life lived inside the same house must be different.

It is critical, however, to note that everything I’ve described here takes time. It takes time to unpack yourself inside a new space, to make sense of its layout, to get to know the ghosts who inhabit its rooms, to tell your own story inside. The more you put into a work of art, the more you get out of it. It’s no different from visiting a new country: instead of rushing about to hit the ten “must-see” sites of Rome in a single day, you’re far more likely to learn something lasting about yourself as well as Rome by spending the whole morning inside a single church, letting two thousand plus years of history settle onto you, examining every mural and statue, listening to the murmur of every conversation, and thinking deeply about what has brought you to that moment and the course of your life after. You can no more rush through a book than you can rush the process of falling in love. There are no shortcuts.

We all live in a world with many deadlines and incessant demands for our time and attention. That inevitably makes us feel rushed. Can you share with our readers five strategies that you use to “slow down to do more”? Can you please give a story or example for each?

1. Communicate. We tend to mistake deadlines for actual goals. Goals have meaning: solve the client’s problem, craft a good book, find the right answer. Deadlines, on the other hand, are just arbitrary dates. It’s far more important to hit goals than deadlines. When at risk of missing a deadline, it’s better to communicate with whoever has set the deadline to see if the goal can be met by slowing down, rather than rushing to meet the deadline and miss the goal.
2. Treasure rest. You’re not a machine, and you can’t work constantly. If you try, you’ll soon reach a point of diminishing returns where you’ll be spending hours on something that would take you only a few minutes if you were fresh. Periods of focused rest — when you give yourself permission to do nothing work-related — are extremely important for ensuring that the work you do remains high quality. This is why something like the pomodoro method can be so helpful.
3. Play. Play is one of the most important aspects of being human, and we don’t give it its due. Play is about engaging our curiosity, imagination, and creativity. Making time for play will not only help you in your work — curiosity, imagination, and creativity are crucial to doing work that only you can do — but make you live life fully.
4. Say no. This is particularly important for creatives. I often hear people say that they wish they could be more original in their thinking. This is a skill that can be taught — and the secret to being original is learning to say no. Because of the associational nature of our brains, when faced with a prompt or question, we tend to come up with answers that have the strongest associations in our minds with the prompt: also known as clichés. Clichéd answers come up so easily because we’ve seen them so many times. So the trick to being original is to say no to the first five, ten, twenty answers that comes to mind. Only after you’ve exhausted the easy answers will you push yourself to form the unexpected new connections, to make the leaps of intuition that lead to bold new answers.
5. Follow your excitement. Whenever you feel you’re mired in unpleasant tasks, ask yourself: where are the things that excite you on that list? If nothing on that list is exciting to you, then chances are that you need to reevaluate the path you’re on to refocus on things that excite you. There was a time when I hated the list of things I had to write — for a writer, that was deadly. I reevaluated my list and realized that I was spending all my time chasing freelance writing assignments and publicity articles (writing that is for short-term gain and in support of the art) instead of working on my new novel (the actual art that makes me excited). I stopped the writing that gave me no joy and went back to working on my novel and instantly felt better.

How do you define “mindfulness”? Can you give an example or story?

In Daoism, there is an ideal called 燕處超然,which can be loosely rendered into English as “holding still as a swallow at ease.” The image here is of a swallow sitting in a muddy nest, completely at ease in its element, unperturbed by the noise of the urban environment or the humans rushing about. I consider this to be an excellent image for mindfulness. When you’re mindful, you’re fully present in the universe in that moment and completely at ease. You are no longer distracted by regrets, by anticipatory fears, by insecurities. You are operating at the speed of the cosmos itself, not struggling against Heraclitus’s river.

Can you give examples of how people can integrate mindfulness into their everyday lives?

One of the best ways to cultivate mindfulness is to remind yourself to be grateful. We all have things in our lives that we can be grateful for: material security, love of our spouse and children, youth, health, friends who wish to help us in our journey. Simply being alive, being part of the universe’s attempt to understand itself and to imagine what doesn’t yet exist into being, is amazing.

There are many ways to do this. One practice I’ve found helpful is to keep a journal where, at the end of each day, I write down a few things that I’m grateful for that day. Another practice is to make it a point to tell people how much I appreciate their presence in my life. By building habits that encourage ourselves to be grateful, we weave mindfulness into the very fabric of our daily routines.

Do you have any mindfulness tools that you find most helpful at work?

We are so inundated by our technology: concrete, glass, electronics, metal, books, words, social media … that sometimes we forget its nature. Remember, technology consists of objects that once did not exist, but which now exist thanks to human craft. Thus, technology is our minds made tangible, the manifestation of our thoughts, the embodiment of our nature. Thus, technology is alienating not because it’s anti-human, but because it’s too-much-human. When we’re immersed in technology, we’re immersed in our ego, in illusions produced by our own minds. That is why we have trouble finding mindfulness in a work setting.

Thus, keeping aspects of uncrafted nature at work can be very helpful. A few rocks, a little succulent plant, a bit of grass and soil and an open window — these things penetrate the sea of technology, the shell of our ego, and remind us that we’re biological beings, that we are mortal, that we are not alone. These anchors of nature remind us to be grateful for the gift of consciousness, to be connected to the bedrock of the universe.

What are your favorite books, podcasts, or resources that inspire you to use mindfulness tools or practices?

Laozi’s Dao De Jing is a favorite. For more than two millennia it has inspired and guided, yet it has resisted being “understood” and pinned down. Laozi distrusted language and argued that whatever can be captured by symbolic language isn’t real wisdom — while giving this sentiment in symbolic language. I love that paradox.

Like all great books, it can be read over and over, and always yields some new insight. In the same way that each walk along the same forest path is different, each reading is also different. The seasons change, as do your moods; you may stop to examine a rock one day and to admire a house wren the next; you may decide to wander off the path one day and trim the brambles the next … Precisely because it’s a very short book, it invites slow-reading. The slower you go through it, the better.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

This is a quote from the Dao De Jing: “Favor and scorn are both terrors. Favor takes power from you. When you don’t have it, you crave it. When you do have it, you dread losing it.”

When you work in the arts, it’s very easy to mistake popularity for artistic worth, and to become dependent on the reaction of others for your validation. But interesting art, by definition, must say something new about the universe. The new is often unpopular. To be guided by your inner compass, to treat favor and scorn both as mere noise, to hold still as a swallow at ease while pursuing your vision — that is the secret to artistic happiness.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I would like sincerity to be cool again.

So much of our contemporary discourse is rooted in irony, caricature, and performative righteousness. Decades of online living and ubiquitous recording have left us all paranoid and distrustful, prone to dehumanize anyone who disagrees with us. This is why trolling is so dominant as a technique in everything from politics to entertainment, and also why we’ve all been trained to treat every utterance as merely a line from a script, divorced from reality. Some of the most popular social media posts I see are aggressive declarations of how much the poster doesn’t care about issue X. Why even say that? What can possibly be the purpose other than implying the poster’s own superiority for not caring? We’ve turned ourselves into a low-trust society, and I think this, more than anything else, makes our problems seem intractable.

What could we not accomplish if we made sincerity the default mode in which we speak as well as listen?

Thank you so much for these insights! This was so inspiring!