The Backwards Law: Why Trying Too Hard Is Keeping You Stuck
I want things badly.
I want this blog to reach people who need it. I want my children to be well and happy and to actually talk to me. I want to feel financially secure. I want the house by the sea with the garden full of flowers and the kitchen I designed myself. I want all of it, quite urgently, fairly often.
And David Bayer would say that is precisely the problem.
Not the wanting. The urgency. The grip. The way that wanting something desperately is, paradoxically, one of the most reliable ways to keep it just out of reach.
Episode 222 of A Changed Mind is called The Backwards Law. It is one of the most disorienting episodes I have listened to, in the best possible sense. I’ve paused it to sit in silence with what I had just heard.
Table of Contents
What Is the Backwards Law?
The Backwards Law is a concept that has roots in Eastern philosophy, particularly in the work of Alan Watts, but David Bayer brings it into the language of personal development and goal achievement in a way that is very specific and very practical.
The core idea: the more desperately you pursue something, the more you signal to your unconscious mind – and, in Bayer’s framework, to the universe – that you lack the thing. And lack attracts more lack. The energy of desperate wanting is the energy of not-having.
This is not just philosophy. Bayer argues that it operates as a mechanism in your neuroscience, in your behaviour, and in how you show up in every context that relates to your goal.
When you want something badly and haven’t got it yet, you do things from fear. You overwork. You force. You push past the signal that something isn’t right because stopping feels like giving up. You make decisions from scarcity rather than from clarity. You cannot see the obvious next step because you are too focused on the gap between where you are and where you desperately need to be.
The result, almost always, is that you work harder, exhaust yourself, and get less done than someone who is doing the same work from a calmer, more connected place.
How This Changed My Life
I started this blog from a genuine place of love for books and podcasts and personal development. I still feel that love. But somewhere in the first few months, something shifted. The blog became something I was watching, measuring, hoping. I started checking statistics. Wondering whether posts were good enough. Comparing.
That is the energy of lack. And Bayer is right that it does not produce the same work as the energy of love.
The best posts I have written on this blog – the ones I still enjoy re-reading, the ones readers mention most – were written in a kind of flow state. I was not thinking about reach or SEO or whether anyone would care. I was just trying to explain something I found genuinely interesting, the way I would to a friend over coffee.
The posts I have found hardest to write have almost all had one thing in common: I was thinking about them from the outside in. What should this post do? What do people want? Am I doing this right?
The Untethered Soul (Michael A. Singer) got at something similar – the observer self that can watch the machinery of thought and emotion from outside it. The Backwards Law adds a practical edge to that: when you notice you’re in the grip of desperate wanting, that is the moment to take your hands off the wheel slightly. Not to stop working. To do the work differently.
The Difference Between Effort and Desperation
I want to be careful here, because this is where the Backwards Law gets misread.
It is not saying don’t try. It is not saying effort is bad or that you should float around waiting for things to land in your lap. Bayer is extremely clear about this. The Backwards Law is not an argument for passivity.
It is an argument for doing the work from a place of wholeness rather than a place of need.
There is a version of working towards your goals that comes from genuine engagement – curiosity, love, craft, service. You do it because it is the right thing to do, because you are built for it, because the work itself is worth doing. You are not attached to a specific outcome because you trust the direction.
And there is a version that comes from fear of not having what you want. You work hard but the effort is contaminated by anxiety. You push through signals that something isn’t working because stopping feels like failure. Every result is filtered through the question: is this enough yet?
The first version tends to produce better outcomes. The second tends to produce exhaustion.
Bayer’s practical test: when you’re working on something important to you, are you doing it from love or from fear? This is not a rhetorical question. He suggests pausing and actually asking it before you start work each day.
The Three Shifts That Help
1. Gratitude before action. Before starting work on something you want badly, spend a few minutes in genuine gratitude for what already exists. Not as a performance. Not as a technique. But as a real reset of your internal state. Bayer argues that gratitude is the fastest route from the energy of lack to the energy of wholeness – because it is impossible to be genuinely grateful and genuinely desperate at the same time.
I use EFT tapping for this. Nick Ortner’s Tapping Solution pairs perfectly with the kind of internal state reset Bayer is describing – the ability to bring yourself back to calm and trust before you pick up the work again.
2. Define the process, release the outcome. Set clear intentions for what you will do – how you will show up, what you will create, what action you will take – rather than for what you will receive. The outcome is not within your direct control. Your effort, your quality, your consistency – those are.
GRIT (Angela Duckworth) talks about this in terms of passion and perseverance: the quality that keeps you going is not attachment to a specific outcome, but genuine engagement with the direction of travel.
3. Notice the grip and loosen it. The grip is what Bayer calls the specific, urgent attachment to one particular version of how things need to go. Notice when you have it – that tight, anxious feeling that everything has to work out exactly this way. Loosen it. Not abandon the goal. Just release the specific image of how it arrives.
This is counterintuitive enough that it takes practice. The Power of Intention (Wayne Dyer) calls it the same thing in different language: set the intention clearly, do the work faithfully, then release the attachment to the specific form.
Practical Takeaways
1. Ask the question before you start work. Am I doing this from love or from fear? If it’s fear – what specifically are you afraid of? Naming the fear often dissolves some of its grip.
2. Work like you don’t need it to go perfectly. This is not low standards. It is freedom from performance anxiety. The cyclist who rides relaxed gets almost the same results as the one who strains – and arrives ready to go again tomorrow.
3. Watch for signs of forced effort. You know the feeling: pushing through when nothing is flowing, making decisions because you feel you should rather than because they’re right, overworking from anxiety. Those are signals, not badges of honour.
4. Let gratitude be a real practice, not a technique. The nights I write in my journal three things I am genuinely grateful for are not just the nights I sleep better – they are the mornings where the work feels most natural. I do not fully understand the mechanism. I trust the observation.
5. Define yourself by the doing, not the having. Hell Yeah or No (Derek Sivers) makes the same point from a different angle: your identity is what you do, not what you have or what you’re working towards. The Backwards Law adds: focus on the doing, and the having tends to follow.
Why This Belongs in Purpose
Purpose, in the Tree of Life framework, is where I put the things that are about mission – how we work, why we work, what we’re building and why it matters.
The Backwards Law belongs here because it is fundamentally about how to pursue what matters most without destroying yourself in the process. It is about the quality of effort, not the quantity. About working from a place of trust rather than fear. About being the kind of person who can show up day after day – not because they’re driven by desperation, but because the work itself is worth doing.
That is what purpose feels like when it’s working. Not feverish. Not anxious. Not attached to a specific arrival date. Just present. Doing the thing. Trusting the direction.
Full stop.
Notes from Soph | Learning, not perfection.
Et toi? Is there something you want so badly that the wanting itself might be getting in the way? Come and talk about it in the Notes from Soph community on Skool – this is one of those topics where honest conversation is everything.
Source Details: A Changed Mind: Episode 222, The Backwards Law David Bayer | 2026
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