Books · July 2026
We did it ourselves: notes on the Tao Te Ching
Reading notes, not an essay
I finally read the Tao Te Ching, 107 pages that have been sitting on my to-read shelf since 2023. It's 2,500 years old and it kept describing my job. Four passages that stuck, and what I heard in them.
The leader they barely notice
The best leader is one the people barely know exists. Next best is one they love and praise. Next, one they fear. Worst, one they despise. When the best leader's work is done, the people say: we did it ourselves.Chapter 17
I've written elsewhere that leadership is direction, not oversight: past a point the job isn't watching the work, it's choosing what's worth doing next and making that clear. Lao Tzu gets there in four lines and then goes further, to the part I find hardest. If you've set direction well, you become invisible in the result. "We did it ourselves" is not a failure of attribution. It's the strongest evidence the leading worked.
The same chapter has a line I'd pin above every re-org and every working agreement: he who does not trust enough will not be trusted. I'd rather operate on a handshake than a contract, and when a relationship needs heavy paperwork to function, that's usually the diagnosis, not the cure. Turns out that observation wasn't new in 500 BC either.
Great things start small
Handle the difficult while it is still easy; build the great from what is small. The hardest things in the world begin while they are easy. The greatest things in the world begin while they are small. A tree you can barely reach around grows from a shoot. A nine-story tower rises from a basket of earth. A journey of a thousand miles begins under your feet.Chapters 63 · 64
Everyone knows the last line as a poster. Read in place, it's not a motivational quote, it's an operating model, and it's the one I keep preaching: small bets over big decisions. Make each decision small enough that being wrong is cheap, make a lot of them, let each one teach you the next. The zero-to-one I love is the shoot and the basket of earth; the one-to-n is the tower, and the tower never skips the basket stage. Lao Tzu even covers the failure mode two lines later: he who grasps the whole thing at once loses it.
Subtract daily
In the pursuit of learning, something is added every day. In the pursuit of the way, something is dropped every day. Drop and drop again, until you arrive at not-forcing. By not-forcing, nothing is left undone.Chapter 48
My favorite definition of thinking, after Hofstadter, is the ability to look at a complex situation and strip away the things that don't count. Chapter 48 is that, turned into a daily practice. Twenty years in, most of my useful work is subtraction: cutting scope, killing projects that are locally fine and globally pointless, unlearning the habits that got me the previous job. Adding is easy and feels productive. Dropping is the discipline.
Teaching without words
The sage acts without striving and teaches without words.Chapters 2 · 43
As a dad this is the one that got me. My boys watch me far more than they listen to me; if I want curious kids, the cheapest intervention is to be visibly curious in front of them. I've built a whole argument on that observation. Lao Tzu needs seven words. That gap, between my paragraph and his seven words, is roughly what the rest of the book is about.
Renderings are mine, adapted freely from the public-domain translations. The book takes an hour to read and considerably longer to put down; it's on my bookshelf with the rest of my notes.