Introduction Chapter from “IN/ACTION: Rethinking the Path to Results”
This is the Introduction to my multiple award winning book “IN/ACTION: Rethinking the Path to Results” available everywhere you buy books online. If you enjoy reading it, please share with your network.
“The skillful leader subdues the enemy without any fighting, he captures their cities without laying siege to them, he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field. With his forces intact, he will dispute the mastery of the Empire, thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete. This is the method of attacking by stratagem.”
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
It’s 1812, and Napoleon is headed your way with over one hundred thousand soldiers, his Grand Armée. You are a Russian general, Mikhail Kutuzov, an old, battle-worn, wizened soldier and general, holding firm in Moscow. Napoleon’s planned attack on Moscow is the highest form of aggression. It is, in fact, an attack on all of Russia.
Fully dressed in your soldier’s uniform and battle ready, you stand over a mass of maps, pouring over them, while surrounded by your staff and comrades. You all review Napoleon’s path and how long it will take for him to get to Moscow. Your lieutenants make recommendations on where and how you should counterattack. The boss man, Czar Alexander, expects to hear of your plans to attack and arrest Napoleon’s progress.
Your entire military career has centered on taking decisive action. The enemy approaches. The threat is clear and visible. You need to take action before he gets to Moscow. You need to stop him.
What do you do? Do you attack him on his way? Or do you get ready to defend?
General Kutuzov chooses neither.
He chooses to retreat. He evacuates and abandons Moscow. His comrades keep urging him to take action, but he chooses to wait. He says to himself over and over, like a mantra: Time and patience. Patience and time
Napoleon marches on. His plan was to take over Moscow. And he does just that. He now expects a formal surrender.
But no one is there to surrender. Everyone is gone. The troops are gone. The residents are gone too. On the way out, the army and civilians have set the city on fire.
Here is Napoleon, in an abandoned city with no food for his troops, helplessly watching the fires burn everything in sight. It’s October—it’s cold in Moscow, with subzero temperatures. He knows he needs to head back, or his troops will not survive the winter without food and supplies. He orders his troops to start for France. But he has underestimated the harsh conditions of the Russian countryside. Hypothermia sets in for many of his soldiers and horses. His army is decimated. Napoleon makes it back to France but with only a fraction of his Grand Armée.
According to Jesse Greenspan in his historical analysis, this defeat was the beginning of the end for Napoleon.
Kutuzov wasn’t paralyzed into inaction because of fear. His apparent inaction was a thoughtful choice to not default to a counterattack or defense. He achieved his goal of defeating Napoleon. You might say he exceeded his goal by dealing a crushing defeat without expending the usual cost of delivering such a defeat: lives of soldiers.
To Act or Not to Act
We tend to celebrate action, especially acts of heroism and bravado. Most success stories are associated with what the protagonist did. Kutuzov didn’t win any kudos for retreating and letting time and weather take its toll. Stories of pausing, patience, or waiting aren’t glamorous or heroic to tell.
Why is that? Why don’t we celebrate the pause? The strategic waiting. The off-playbook but thoughtful inaction. Is it because that approach usually doesn’t lead to a win? I wondered if Kutuzov’s was a one-off fortuitous story or an approach that could be studied and repeated.
What I found has changed the way I see ambition, action, results, and the relationship between them.
The definition of ambition is closely linked with a desire for success and power. And yet, the more ambitious we are, the more likely we are to struggle with stress and anxiety. A 2014 research study conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, found a “strong correlation between the highs and lows of perceived power and mood disorders,” especially among the young. The world has become more competitive. There are more options to choose from; more information comes at us than ever before. Technology has disrupted every part of our lives, in both good and destructive ways. Newer ways of working and newer opportunities pop up everywhere and every day. Fifty years ago, the world had less of everything to choose from: fewer professions, career paths, and even dating platforms (you met your sweetheart through family, college, or work, instead of swiping right on dozens of dating apps in existence today). Now there is more of everything to choose from. Even the choice of college majors has grown in the United States. There are thirty more majors today compared to fifty years ago.
All this advancement has a downside. The more information that we are taking in, which needs to be processed, the more overwhelming the task of making a choice has become. We think we need to work hard to achieve our goals. But no matter what choices we make, there’s always a feeling of uncertainty. Maybe we should be doing more or working harder. The more there is to choose from and to achieve, the more action we take toward our goals.
In chasing our goals, we start chasing action.
In our lives, hard work translates into a lot of doing. Action requires expenditure of resources, both mental and physical. Doing takes effort, which in turn consumes energy. Most productivity hacks are about doing more. Unfortunately, time doesn’t expand; only the list of to-dos does. To compensate, we give up on rest and load up on stimulants, like coffee or prescription drugs, further compromising our energy levels. According to a Forbes article, people between twenty and thirty-nine are the fastest growing population segment for stimulant prescriptions.
Hard work then translates into long working hours, which lead to poor health. A 2021 global study from the World Health Organization found that working fifty-five hours or more a week was linked to a 35 percent higher risk of stroke and a 17 percent higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, compared to a thirty-five-to-forty-hour work week. This study included data from over 154 countries across multiple lines of work and measured the impact of long hours over several years.
Chasing action is not sustainable in the short term either. No matter how much we employ productivity tips to cram more into the day, there’s always a feeling of falling behind. We never have enough hours in the day. In our single-minded pursuit of our goals, we ignore aspects of life such as health and well-being. When we are young, we think we will have time to attend to that later. Before we know it, this habit of chasing action turns into a behavioral trait that stays with us as we age. For many, a wake-up call comes in the form of burnout, sickness, or estrangement from family and loved ones. Often, in our determined pursuit of results, we choose the wrong actions that either push the result away or create another set of problems. Chasing action can lead to avoidable mistakes. I have made a few mistakes myself, which I will share in later chapters.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Ambition is something to be celebrated. There’s nothing wrong in wanting results or success. A desire for success is an innate part of who we are. It’s what drives progress. I believe we can achieve desired results without paying the price of chasing action. In my interviews and research, I found it is possible to avoid unnecessary or counterproductive action. In looking back into my own life, I have deployed this approach with better-than-expected results.
I moved to the United States from Mumbai, India, for grad school in my early twenties, highly unusual for unmarried females with my cultural background. I pivoted twice in my career, moved cross country and back while working at companies ranging from $250 million to $19 billion dollars in sales, growing to become vice president of strategy for a $12 billion–dollar North American retail business. Somewhere in that journey, I took a sabbatical to work with artisans in Morocco. I noticed that every one of my big and bold moves was preceded by a phase during which I felt underproductive, even lazy. I hated those phases. Looking back, it was in the middle of apparent inaction that the seeds of the next big idea were being sown. A kind of momentum was building up during these outwardly inactive phases. And when I felt ready, I made my move. More recently, this book was borne out of my boredom and restlessness during the inactivity imposed on us all during the 2020 pandemic.
What has changed after writing this book is that instead of hating the periods I would have described as wastefully underproductive, I better appreciate the power of what looks like inactivity but isn’t.
As part of my book research, I interviewed over thirty people across Europe, North America, and India—each considered successful in their sphere of life. What I have discovered from these interviews, my own life experiences, and from established research studies is this: While chasing action can very well lead to results, it takes mastering action to achieve remarkable results. And the fastest way to mastering action is by leveraging strategic inaction.
Action uses up time, mental and physical energy, and other personal resources. While some action is required to get to results, there is almost always a less expensive way (by taking less action) to getting those results.
Mastering action is knowing when to act and when not to act. Strategic, or thoughtful, inaction is a lever that leads to results with less expenditure of resources.
Think back to Kutuzov. By retreating, he conserved his main resource: the lives of his soldiers. He didn’t officially surrender even after Napoleon took over Moscow. He did nothing but wait for Napoleon to decide on his next course of action, which was to head back to France. Kutuzov leveraged strategic inaction.
While Napoleon was on his way back, Kutuzov finally acted. He strategically attacked Napoleon, forcing his army on a route that increased the probability of starvation. By choosing to retreat at first, Kutuzov built up momentum: His army was rested and strong; the opponent’s was fatigued and weak. He let the unexpectedly brutal winter cause damage to his opponent’s army. When he did take action, he weakened Napoleon’s army enough to make sure they wouldn’t rebuild or return.
By conserving energy you would have spent on chasing action, you leave your mind open to discovering off-playbook and nonlinear paths to results. You allow unexpected and serendipitous events to reveal opportunities to you. You build up momentum and then deploy resources to maximum advantage when the circumstances are right.
Strategic, or thoughtful, inaction is different from inaction that comes from fear or inertia. That would be inaction caused by helplessness and mental paralysis. Strategic inaction is a choice; it requires original thinking. It is not “letting the chips fall where they may.” It is awareness that the default action is not the right choice in that moment and that inaction is the better option.
It is a period of pause to allow for inspired action to show up.
About This Book
This book is not about pausing for the sake of it or about slowing down as an end goal. In fact, this book is about developing a path to results and success—without paying the typical price of nonstop doing.
Platitudes such as “money/success aren’t everything” aside, we are always working toward something: a job, a life partner, buying a home, a startup exit, a nonprofit launch. Contrary to the usual action-packed formulaic advice such as “ten things you need to do to [fill in your goal],” this book is about leveraging the power of strategic inaction to find a nonlinear path to great results.
Kutuzov is one example; we will visit other stories of strategic inaction. What if we don’t do what the experts, wisdom of the masses, or our own mind compel us to do? What if we are like Singh, CEO of a major global medical imaging firm, who was informed of the death of a child on a machine made by his company and went for a two-hour walk instead of immediately calling an emergency staff meeting and lawyering up? What if we, like Tyler Hayes, a successful Silicon Valley founder, shunned the proven venture capital route for fundraising and chose the far easier and less stressful (and less used) crowd-funding path for our fourth business? Spoiler alert: They both got far better results and unexpected wins.
This book explores stories of those who have “made it” by usual social standards: success, wealth, overall life satisfaction. It explores the approaches and mental models they used. It looks into research on the science of inactivity and doing nothing. Lastly, it provides an approach to developing mastery of action through strategic inaction. Ultimately, this book is about making room for inspired action to lead us on a nonlinear path to great results.
In part one, we will explore why and how we got here. We will explore how ambition, aspiration, and even self-awareness create progress, as well as the tendency of chasing action.
Part two is about the major obstacles to mastering action and our tendency to default to a playbook, create narrow and rigid goals, and create cause and effect where none exists.
Part three explores habits we can develop to counter our action bias. We will discover how daydreaming, mind-wandering, laziness, and procrastination—usually scorned behaviors—can provide access to creative ideas and inspired action.
Chapters in parts one through three have questions at the end that are meant to be contemplated. I recommend chewing them over; don’t be in a hurry to answer them.
While action and inaction may seem like black-and-white choices, in part four we will discover a perspective on mastery of action that requires going beyond this apparent dichotomy. The last chapter has a summary of takeaways from the book.
By the time you are finished reading, I will have demonstrated and hopefully convinced you of this:
Life is not as hard as it seems. Life is not a hamster wheel, which runs only if we keep running. Something much more than our actions makes our world go around. It is worth stopping long enough to connect with the undulating flow of life. It is worth riding this flow of life, which can carry us further than we could ever go with our own doing alone.
Praise for IN/ACTION—Rethinking the Path to Results
"A paradox of our frenetic time is that we can often accomplish more by standing still. Jinny Uppal has written a masterful roadmap for how we can lead lives that are more placid and healthful without sacrificing our goals.”
Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestseller author of The Power of Regret, When, and Drive
“These days, we are all too busy, pushing forward and driving results. But Jinny Uppal provides a fresh perspective: in some cases, taking action might not be the solution, but the problem. Read this book to discover an empowering framework to help you make smart decisions and get the best results.”
—Dorie Clark, Global Thinker in Thinkers 50, WSJ Best-Selling Author, The Long Game
“Passionate. An inspired call that melds history, biography, and social science together to foster how we might better approach action within ourselves and others.”
—Eugene Soltes, Professor at Harvard Business School, Author, Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal
“As a corporate leader at multiple Fortune 100 companies, this book gave me pause to reconsider my own action bias and that there are multiple paths to desired outcomes. I will be recommending IN/ACTION to all my friends and colleagues.”
—Julie Elmore, Chief Technology Officer, Dollar General Corporation
“What if all the business gurus advocating a “bias for action” were wrong? Jinny Uppal shows why at times inaction can be the best strategy. She backs up this counterintuitive concept with stories and research that demonstrate how doing nothing, or at least pausing, often leads to better outcomes. Uppal teaches you a new way to think about making decisions, handling crises, and even responding to personal attacks. One action you shouldn’t delay: reading IN/ACTION!”
—Roger Dooley, International Keynote Speaker and Author of Friction and Brainfluence
“An absorbing collection of stories and research woven through crisp leadership takeaways, IN/ACTION illustrates how thoughtful, intentional pauses can empower incredible success.”
—Lindsay Kaplan, Founder of Chief, Senior Women’s Executive Network
“In a world that has become blindly focused on hustle culture, Jinny Uppal’s book is a breath of fresh air that reminds us to pause and reflect on alternative, more efficient paths to desired results in business, nonprofits and life.”
—Dan Driscoll, Social Entrepreneur, Ashoka Fellow
“Every overachiever who grew up being taught that we must constantly produce or perform to be successful should read this book. Jinny Uppal presents a much-needed alternative which helps us accomplish more and often better by doing less. This book digs deep into the stories of successful people from multiple walks of life and truly illustrates the power of strategic inaction, when much of life’s magic takes place, leading to great results and overall well-being.
—Pavita Singh, Mental Health Advocate, Author, To All The Magic In Me
