Do Less, Achieve More

Chin-Ning Chu's subject is the gap between effort and result. Her opening line states the case plainly, that pursuing any task in great anxiety takes tremendous effort to realise a meagre result, and the book works outward from that observation towards what its subtitle calls the hidden power of giving in. Chu treats relaxation, mental focus, control of one's own thinking and plain contentment not as rewards for success but as the instruments of it, which is why the cataloguers file the book under success, attitude change and time management together. Her handling of time is unorthodox: the aim is not to pack more motion into the hours but to find the work that genuinely energises you, against a modern habit of doing and doing and then dying. She offers a simple exercise for testing whether a particular goal is realistic for the person holding it, a chapter on creative dreaming that works on problems through the subconscious mind, material she calls quantum thinking, and a section that uses the inevitability of death as a way of overcoming fear. A late passage on surrendering to divinely appointed work sits oddly with the rest.

Written from the library catalogue record and reader review for the ReganBooks edition at the Internet Archive.

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