You don’t get the full development of human personality by trying to cultivate personality. Did you ever hear of anybody who had true personality who got it through taking a course on how to win friends and influence people? Or how to be a real person? You never did. It’s rather: when you forget about your personality, and you become interested in something else, that you become interesting to other people.
This is an example of what’s sometimes called a paradox—I simply call it the backwards law—which runs all the way through Taoist and Zen philosophy: that contrary things come from actions, unexpected things. That is to say, when you would be strong, very often the best course is to be weak. When you would be powerful, the best course often is to withdraw.
