Some old laws were never passed by any parliament, printed in any gazette or enforced by any constable, yet they're obeyed more faithfully than most of the statutes that were. One of them holds that whatever is chased tends to run away. Its more formal name is the law of reverse effort. Put plainly, past a certain point, every extra ounce of trying makes the prize a little less likely. It sounds like something a mystic would say, but it turns up everywhere: in the bedroom and the boardroom, on the fairway and in the farmyard.
A golfer who strangles the club sends the ball off sideways into the rough, where it belongs to the hedges now. A singer who strains for the high note arrives a little flat and a little late, while one who lets the breath carry it upward lands on it as lightly as a moth on a lampshade. Tension pretends to be effort. Mostly it's just an obstacle in a very convincing costume.
Affection may be the clearest case. Pursue someone too eagerly and they start, politely, to edge toward the door. People are drawn to those who seem content without them, because that contentment hints that any attention would be a gift and not a ransom.
Negotiation simply puts a price on the whole arrangement. The side that has to close the deal today almost always gets the worse terms, and both parties know it before anyone takes out a pen. Being free to walk away is worth more than any argument made at the table. A seller who shows desperation has already given ground before the price has even been spoken.
Money, which likes to think of itself as above such things, follows the rule too. Frantic pursuit signals scarcity, and scarcity is a weak position from which to bargain with anyone, including fortune. Quick schemes have a way of attracting equally quick losses, which tend to arrive with the same energy. Patient investors often outlast anxious traders, partly because they aren't jumping at every tremor of the market as if it were a burglar on the stairs.
What all these cases share is that the effort itself builds the wall. Chasing announces a need, and need changes how people and things respond, much as a dog can supposedly smell fear.
None of this is a case for lying on a chaise longue and waiting for the world to bring the tea. The golfer still swings. The investor still invests. What changes is how the grip is held: firm enough to act, loose enough to let the outcome arrive in its own time. The effort goes into the preparation and the practice, and then, at the decisive moment, it's set down like a coat on a chair.
