The French Art of Not Trying Too Hard

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Sick of striving? Giving up on grit? Had enough of hustle culture? Daunted by the 10,000-hour rule? Relax: As the French know, it’s the best way to be better at everything.

In the realm of love, what could be less seductive than someone who’s trying to seduce you? Seduction is the art of succeeding without trying, and that’s a lesson the French have mastered. We can see it in their laissez-faire parenting, chic style, haute cuisine, and enviable home cooking: They barely seem to be trying, yet the results are world-famous–thanks to a certain je ne sais quoi that is the key to a more creative, fulfilling, and productive life. For fans of both Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, philosopher Ollivier Pourriol’s The French Art of Not Trying Too Hard draws on the examples of such French legends as Descartes, Stendhal, Rodin, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Françoise Sagan to show how to be efficient à la française, and how to effortlessly reap the rewards.

A PENGUIN LIFE TITLE“Compelling . . . Pourriol set out to write a readable ‘airport book,’ and he has succeeded. . . . In a year of struggle and travel bans, owing to COVID-19, which makes it impossible for Americans to visit France, this title comes at a perfect time.” ―Library Journal

“[An] amusing and interesting read; even Pourriol’s description of his approach to the material is a lesson in the laissez-faire outlook. Is this likely to change readers’ lives? Peut être pas, but it is fun to think that it might.” ―Booklist

“A thought-provoking and delightful book. Pourriol dismisses it as an airport read. Yet somehow, apparently without effort, he has turned it into so much more. . . . [It is like] a pastry: rich and light rather than stuff to be endlessly chewed over.” ―Daily Mail

“A laissez-faire guide to self-help. This is a book for those who aspire to the déshabillé, Serge-Gainsbourg-and-Jane-Birkin-morning-after look and the studied negligence of the Parisian Bobo (bourgeois-bohemian).” ―The Times (London)

“There are many gems to be found.” ―OUTinPerthOllivier Pourriol is a philosopher, writer, and novelist. He lives in Paris, where his lectures mixing philosophy and cinema are widely attended, and where he puts his ideas into practice over aperitifs with friends.

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It’s like it hasn’t really started

Alberto Giacometti

The hardest part is knowing where to begin. How to approach things? In what order? When you’re talking to someone with a drink in your hand, these kinds of questions don’t come up. You say what you have to say, in any old order. The conversation has always already started, and you just have to keep it going. But with writing, the moment you start, problems arise. I’ll be honest-I’ve rewritten this opening countless times. And each time I’ve crossed it out and tried again. Everyone knows the story of Orpheus, the musician who goes down into the Underworld to rescue his wife, Eurydice. Like Orpheus with Eurydice, instead of moving forward, every time I started I’d look back, and lose the very thing I’d just snatched from the void. And yet in Orpheus’s case, Hades, the god of the Underworld, had been quite clear: “Orpheus, just this once, since you play the flute so nicely, I will let you bring your wife back from the kingdom of the dead, but on one condition, and one condition only: you must not turn around to look at her, not even once, till you are back in the light of day. Agreed?” He couldn’t have been any clearer. The contract included no small print. Everything was spelled out, even if the condition imposed was a bit strange. Why forbid Orpheus to look at his wife? Surely that’s the kind of rule that cries out to be broken? Well indeed. But Greek myths are not just stories; they are infused with wisdom. And in this case the recommendation is clear: if you want to reach your goal, think of nothing else. Keep going, and don’t look back.

Why? You know why. Because otherwise doubt sets in and soon you’re going backward. You get lost in your thoughts instead of acting, and you lose your instinct. If you doubt, you fall. This is equally true for the bashful lover who falters, for the tightrope walker with his toe on the rope, or for the waiter carrying his tray aloft. The tightrope walker first follows the line of his gaze, looking straight ahead, never down or back, not even up. His gaze becomes the line that supports him. The waiter, less perilously, keeps his balance by moving forward, with his shout of “coming through!,” as if magically clearing a path for his tray laden with fragile things and drinks about to spill. This is how Moses must have proceeded as he crossed the Red Sea. Fortune favors the brave. Don’t look back, keep going.

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So today it’s settled, I’ve been preparing long enough and now I’m off, and I won’t be looking back. Why? To see if it works. To see if this book might-not write itself, that would be too much to ask-but perhaps give birth to itself, by the very method it recommends. If it could prove by example that its advice works. Where does this advice come from? Not from me, I can assure you. But I have tested it all for myself. These are practical tips gathered from encounters, personal and literary, that I use so often I no longer realize I’m doing so. I’ve borrowed from philosophers and artists and athletes as well as from fictional characters. I’ve brought in men and women of action, as well as thinkers-and sometimes they’re one and the same: Descartes, Montaigne, Bergson, Bachelard, Pascal, Cyrano de Bergerac, Rodin, Gérard Depardieu, Napoleon, Yannick Noah, Zinedine Zidane, Stendhal, Franoise Sagan, the philosopher Alain, the chef Alain Passard, the tightrope walker Philippe Petit, the psychoanalyst Franois Roustang, the diver Jacques Mayol, the pianist Hélène Grimaud, and many others. You’ll meet them as we go along. In short, I’ve used the people and names that came to mind.

You will have noticed that what came to hand was essentially French. This is not by chance. Of course, I am French, and you have to start from what you know, hoping that through the particular you might connect with the universal. But there is also a typically French notion of facility. We will examine it carefully, without falling into the trap of intellectual nationalism. To be French is to be attached linguistically and mentally to a place, not a race. An idea is French only if it can be universalised. The French mind-set is open to all comers-this is its strength, its beauty, its nobility. Descartes may well have been “in the history of thought, the French cavalryman who set the pace,” as the essayist Charles Péguy described him, but unlike Péguy, who served and died as a lieutenant in the First World War, Descartes became a soldier not out of patriotism but because he longed to travel and to see the world. The influential Péguy suggested that Descartes’ style and ideas were irreducibly French, but the method Descartes invented to make thinking seem as easy as being belongs to no one; the obviousness of his “I think therefore I am” is universal, which is why a philosopher as German as Hegel could say of Descartes that he was the hero of modern philosophy and not just the hero of French philosophy. Ideas belong to those who understand them, and methods to those who use them.

When we say “France,” France itself is no more than an idea-une certaine idée-which exists in the collective imagination in its condensed form of “Paris,” the international symbol of all forms of freedom, the dream of thinkers and artists. This Paris is evoked in the alluringly titled Le Rendez-vous des Étrangers (Where Strangers Meet) by Elsa Triolet, Louis Aragon’s muse-a Paris in which the Spanish Picasso, Russian Chagall, and Italian Giacometti all felt at home, and with good reason:

The people who gathered in Montparnasse formed a sort of foreign legion, though the only crime they had on their conscience was that of being far from home, far from their own milieu . . . Paris had handed over this small corner to us . . . This place for the displaced was as Parisian as Notre-Dame and the Eiffel Tower. And when, like a firework, genius erupted out of this small crowd, it was still the Parisian sky that received its reflected glory.

When the Chinese painter Zao Wou-Ki first set foot in Paris in 1948, he knew only one word of French, one open-sesame that he gave to the taxi driver: “Montparnasse.” He didn’t mean the train station, he meant the mythical place that all aspiring painters dream of. He spent the rest of his life there in a studio very close to Giacometti’s. Chinese by chance, but French by the dictate of his heart.

By now you’ll have got the point: you don’t have to be French by birth to be attracted to the French way of life. But what, exactly, does it consist of? If you try to define it too closely you miss its essential quality, which is the ability to protect its mystery, and thereby retain its attraction. In the seventeenth century, that of Louis XIV (known as Louis le Grand or Louis the Great), refined thinkers defined good taste with the aristocratic phrase je ne sais quoi, or presque rien, an elusive something or almost nothing, which could signify all the difference between an artistic masterpiece and the rest. Success was not linked to the amount of work put in, but, on the contrary, to the absence of apparent effort-the naturalness, the palpable ease with which the artist had achieved his or her aims. Clearly an artist does work, but like a crafty magician or a person of good manners, he or she must not show it. So the idea of a French art of effortlessness that scorns hard work dates back to the Grand Siècle (the seventeenth century) and the spirit of the royal court. The bourgeois society that came after, born out of the Revolution, logically enough took the opposite approach, vehemently affirming equality and the value of work. If you wanted to stand out you must do so through merit, not birth. So: “to work, citizens!” But, curiously enough, the idea of ease, an eminently royal notion, survived, as though the Revolution, far from wiping out royalty, extended it to everyone, transforming every citizen into a monarch. Dead is He, long live Me! Perhaps the reason why the French are so ill-disciplined, capricious, and prone to complaining is because in each of them exists a monarchic streak, concerned only with their own pleasure. Add to that gastronomy, an exaggerated sense of personal freedom, a taste for beauty, and the desire always to be right, and you will arrive at an approximate but precise formula for the je ne sais quoi, which gives the French soul its characteristic bite. A mixture of noble arrogance and popular insolence, seriousness in things lighthearted and lightness at moments of great seriousness; in short, a desire for effortlessness synonymous with both elegance and pleasure. The extremity of this effortlessness is “studied neglect”: elegance that took hours of preparation, but that acts like it just got out of bed. The deliberate “disheveled look”: I’ve come straight from the hairdresser’s, but it mustn’t show. I spent hours in front of the mirror and in the bathroom making sure I looked spontaneously natural. I’ve been working on this page for months, but I want you to think I improvised it in five seconds flat. True chic always looks completely natural. Make no mistake: achieving effortlessness is quite an art, maybe even the height of art. It’s the hardest thing in the world. Except perhaps for one thing, which is even finer, and even more difficult: refusing to be satisfied with the appearance of effortlessness, but instead feeling it within, experiencing it, living it. Not in outbursts, brief moments of grace, but continuously, assuredly, definitively. “Pleasure is effortless and easy, but you must learn to be happy,” as Gaston Bachelard said. Passing from pleasure to happiness-now there’s a challenge. Bachelard was a professor at the Sorbonne, with a long white beard that made him look like Merlin, a malicious eye, and a greedy appetite for imagination, for friendship, and for poetry, which for him were the ingredients of happiness. In this book I will introduce you to his method, along with others’-for there is not just one but many paths to happiness, some of which overlap-and it is my intention, in the time we are to spend together, to point out to you those that seem to me to be worth pursuing.

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I began this book by saying that nothing was harder than starting. And this law is ironically doubly true for a book devoted to effortlessness. When you write, you spend your time trying to avoid starting, getting lost in preparation, waiting for inspiration. Deep down, one is never ready, and never will be. This is not due to lack of courage or will. It’s just the way it is. It’s the only way it can be. To begin, you have to be a god, capable of starting from nothing to create everything, drawing it out of your own inner substance. There’s no point in getting upset about so-called writer’s block, the famous terror of the blank page, or the fear of committing yourself-starting is quite simply impossible. And let’s not even talk about finishing. Take Giacometti: he was incapable of finishing anything. You literally had to go into his studio and grab the sculptures off him to send them to the foundry before an exhibition. When people asked him why, he calmly explained that he couldn’t finish what hadn’t been started: “I make sculpture to be rid of it, so I can stop sculpting as soon as possible.” “And yet,” you will reply, “you always start again.” Giacometti: “Well, yes, because I never manage to start.” Logical. “So far, I’ve never actually started . . . But if I ever did manage to start it would practically be finished, I think.” It is clear that finishing and starting are both equally impossible. There is, however, a way around this, since Giacometti did work, and his work does exist, even if for him it doesn’t: “I wonder if behind the pretense of work there isn’t simply a kind of obsession, among other obsessions, with fiddling around with clay without actually getting very far.”

The way out, the miracle solution, does exist. It is sublimely simple, and can be summed up in two chapters-actually in two words. If I tell you what they are right now you can close this book and immediately put them into effect, and you won’t have wasted your time. I’ll go on writing the book anyway out of respect for your idea of what makes a book, and for the job of the writer, but please don’t hesitate to leave me right here to go and put your newfound knowledge to use and reap its benefits as quickly as possible. Out of everything I’ve ever read or heard, I’ve found nothing more useful, in every sphere of life. It fits into two lines, taken from a book by the philosopher Alain, who was a teacher, a writer, and a soldier. OK, that’s enough suspense. Here they are: “The whole doctrine of action can be expressed in two chapters, each of which contains a single word. Chapter one, continue. Chapter two, start. The order, which people find surprising, expresses almost the whole idea.” Two words: continue, start. In this order: one idea. You just have to continue, rather than start. Thank you. Nice knowing you-short but sweet. Good-bye. Try to be happy.

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For those who have decided to stick around a bit for further enlightenment, I have a confession to make. The first thing I read by Alain was his Propos sur le bonheur (On Happiness), which I borrowed from the municipal library in Hyères-les-Palmiers, the summer before my last year of school. I was hoping for abstractions and big ideas. I was disappointed. It consisted merely of platitudes, life guidance, barely concrete examples. It was several years before I was able to revise my preconceived ideas and properly appreciate the subtlety of his thinking, which some people considered too well written to be profound. “No effort you make to be happy is ever wasted.” You have to have lived a little to appreciate that kind of aphorism, don’t you think? Happiness is easy, it’s within your grasp, Alain tells us. This is not an obvious idea: our experience is, in fact, usually the opposite. We all know that nothing is easy. Don’t we all dream of ease precisely because it is impossible? Feeling weak, no flair, no inspiration? Lacking the energy required to take decisions? Run out of ideas on how to solve a particular problem, or more generally just don’t know what to do with your life? Living and acting are easier than you think. And this is from a man who likes to work. Alain is no dilettante, no slacker. He’s a man of action as well as a philosopher. He is not telling us to stop trying, he just explains where to direct our efforts. It’s quite simple: “Everything’s already started, we just have to continue. Just accept yourself where you are now, with whatever you are about to do next. All resolutions for the future are imaginary. Keep on doing what you’re doing, just do it better.”

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