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Convictioning Back (h/t Lawrence Yeo)
Why effortless action beats endless reaction
Matt Zeigler
September 02, 2025
Lawrence Yeo broke down the relationship between being conditioned and having conviction in his book, The Inner Compass, and - I’m still thinking about this:
When you are conditioned, every action feels tense. But when you have conviction, every action feels fluid.
The Daoists have a concept called wu-wei, which roughly translates to “effortless action.”It recognizes that we have to act within this world, but that we can do so in a way that harmonizes with its natural order. Instead of controlling our way through existence, we can locate its seams and ride alongside them.
This is what having conviction feels like. When you trust your intuition, you recognize your innate capabilities and see all the ways in which they fit within the world. There is an alignment between who you are and what you offer, so you develop the confidence to lean into what makes you unique.
When Lawrence talks about effortless action, he’s describing something we’ve all felt but rarely put a name on.
Because life conditions us, in the extra Skinner sense, to constantly be in respond-react mode. The world is stimuli and we are operating in it. It’s pretty overwhelming, and pretty disturbingly accurate to how a lot of life feels.
But life also gives us the option to have conviction.
Conviction is choice. It’s a pre-commitment to ideals. It’s a sense of gravity that pulls us forward, through the stimuli, beyond the world as it shows up around us, to feel at one with it versus at odds with it.
The frustrating moment becomes fodder for a joke to tell a friend.
The exciting moment becomes fodder for a story to share at work.
Life is always going to be conditioning us if we’re being passive - we have to find a way to be convictioning, pro-actively, where we roll with whatever life throws at us, but keep spiraling higher.
The moments become framed experiences waiting for us to reframe them - not because life stopped conditioning us, but because we started convictioning back.
ps. if you somehow missed Lawrence on Just Press Record, let me say it with conviction, WATCH THIS: