SANTI VILLANUEVA
Don’t Try
If you’re trying to become more disciplined, just stop.
There’s a force more powerful than discipline. A quality that, if embraced, can turn you into the person you know you are. A trait so threatening to the status quo that your parents, teachers, and spiritual leaders began beating it out of you the moment you were born.
I’m talking about obsession.
The obsessed will always beat the disciplined because discipline is forcing yourself to do while obsession is forcing yourself stop.
In 1994, the world-renowned writer and poet Charles Bukowski was buried in his beloved Los Angeles, underneath a tombstone that reads “Don’t Try.”
Don’t try. Two words that encapsulate Bukowski’s philosophy of art and life — a daily reminder for the creative looking to bring change and beauty to a world that is constantly telling you to try and try harder.
When asked, “What do you do? How do you write, create?” Bukowski replied:
“You don’t try. That’s very important: ‘not’ to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.”
The power of obsession is found in patience. The obsessed is impatient with action and patient with results.
But patience is more than waiting for the right moment.
In 1990, Bukowski sent a friendly reminder to a friend. It read:
“We work too hard. We try too hard. Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. It’s been looking right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb. There’s been too much direction. It’s all free, we needn’t be told. Classes? Classes are for asses. Writing a poem is as easy as beating your meat or drinking a bottle of beer.”
“Don’t try” isn’t an excuse to be lazy. Quite the opposite — it’s a reminder that trying and doing are not the same thing and that the more you try the less you do.
At 49 years old, Bukowski left his job at The Post Office with not a dime in his pocket to fully surrender to his obsession. In one letter, he shared…
“I have one of two choices — stay in the post office and go crazy … or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.”
For the next 24 years, Bukowski would go on to become one of the most important (and controversial) voices of the American working class, penning nearly 45 books and thousands of poems.
Contrary to popular belief, true obsession isn’t self-destruction, it’s self-alignment.
To find your obsessions, you must follow your curiosities. Ask yourself: What do you keep coming back to even when no one is watching? What creates a sense of flow and makes time stand still? The answers reveal your obsessions. These aren’t just activities you enjoy — they’re the work that calls to you when discipline fails.