Hey there,
We went to China for a wedding. Two weeks, Chengdu then Beijing, with the deliberate intention of disconnecting from everything Askara. No AI, no product thinking, no checking in on the team. Just friends, then Chiara, and trusting that whatever needed to surface would find its own way through.
China is home to Taoism, one of the world's oldest living philosophical traditions, shaping how this civilisation thinks about nature, leadership, and the relationship between action and stillness for over two thousand years. What struck me almost immediately is how closely it aligns with the way of living I've been cultivating through Source Work, through self-management at Askara, through the instinct that trusting the process is not a platitude but an operational principle.
I'd engaged with Taoist ideas before, but always at a distance. Being in the country where they were born, walking Mount Qingcheng where Taoism was founded, reading the Tao Te Ching on a train through the landscape it was written about, all of that collapsed the distance. What had been intellectual became felt. And the lessons were divinely timed for where I am right now.
The Master Who Kept Talking
Over the past year I've written about trust often. Trusting the process, trusting the team, trusting that you can't force the Source. I believed all of it. But this trip peeled back a layer I hadn't fully seen.
The layer was control. Not the obvious kind, not micromanagement. The subtler version: having a view on how something should be done and offering it before anyone asked. Seeing the most effective path and pointing it out, even when nobody was lost. The problem isn't being wrong. Often I wasn't. The problem is that offering the answer before the question removes the entire learning experience for the other person. Received knowledge doesn't compound the way discovered knowledge does.
Taoism has an idea that the master doesn't teach by talking. The master creates conditions and waits. If a student asks, the master responds. If they don't, the master trusts that the student is working through something on their own time. The master who keeps talking, however brilliant, is serving his own need to be useful.
I recognise that pattern in myself. And carried too far, it becomes exactly what I've been writing against. It becomes forcing the Source.
Action Through Inaction
Wu wei. Action through inaction. Not passivity but responsiveness. Not doing nothing but doing only what the moment requires.
The Tao Te Ching says the supreme good is like water. Water nourishes all things without competing with them. It flows to the lowest places. And because the sea lies below all rivers, it becomes king of them all.
Hearing this on the train, after weeks of deliberately not leading anything, the words rearranged into a complete model for how I want to lead.
The water cycle starts at the mountain top. That's the source: the vision, the direction, the clarity about what we're building and why. That part is mine. I set it and protect it. Source Work in its purest form.
Then the water flows downhill, finding its own path, splitting into rivers that each respond to the terrain they encounter. This is the team working independently. And this is the part where I don't intervene. The river finding its own path is the entire point. When I redirect it because it's not the route I would have chosen, I'm not leading. I'm eroding the banks.
At the bottom, everything gathers. The rivers reach the sea. The sea doesn't command the rivers. It receives them, follows what they found, integrates and holds space for whatever arrived. To lead is to be the lowest point, the place where everything naturally flows together.
Then the water evaporates, rises, returns to the mountain. The cycle begins again. At the top, you're the source. In the middle, you're absent. At the bottom, you follow. The whole thing only works if you trust the middle part.
What Deepens
During the accelerator, I already understood a version of this. We didn't need to stress about what the outcome would be. By focusing on the team, on building the relationships that form the container, whatever emerged would be the right thing. External forces like new developments in AI helped shape something we couldn't have predicted at the start. The Risk Investigation Agent, the graph backend, none of it existed as a plan when we began. It emerged because the conditions were right.
That insight still holds. But China sharpened it.
What's new is trusting at the micro level. Trusting that whatever someone is independently working on is right for a reason in that specific moment. Even when it's not how I would have done it. Even when I can see a faster path or a cleaner solution. The river doesn't need my route. It needs its own, through its own terrain, discovering what only that particular path reveals.
The best leader, as the Tao Te Ching prescribes, is the one whose people believe they're doing it themselves. That's not a trick. It's the natural result of a cycle where the source is clear, the rivers are trusted, and the sea lies below.
May has been the middle part. The rivers have been running. Whatever arrives when I return is what the terrain produced. My job now is to receive it.
With care, Ben