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Most emergencies fix themselves
Napoleon built a habit around this. During all the warring, people came to him with emergencies, insisting he was the only one who could answer and that the problem couldn't wait. He always told them to bring it back in two weeks.
If the problem was still a problem after two weeks, he dealt with it. The thinking behind the habit was that nearly all of those urgent matters would have settled on their own by then.
The same thought runs through the Tao, where the soft overcomes the hard and non-action is often the best action. Water is soft and pliable, and water dripping slowly on a rock eventually eats through it.
Why do urgent tasks crowd out important ones?
Psychologists call this the mere urgency effect. In a 2018 study in the Journal of Consumer Research, Meng Zhu, Yang Yang, and Christopher Hsee found that people often pick tasks with a short deadline over tasks with larger rewards. The pressure of a clock makes a small task feel worth doing first. Dwight Eisenhower summarized the problem in a 1954 speech, quoting a university president who said that what is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.
How does dripping water cut through rock?
Rainwater absorbs carbon dioxide from the air and soil and becomes weakly acidic carbonic acid. Where that water seeps through limestone, it slowly dissolves the stone along cracks. Over thousands of years the openings widen into caves, and the same water leaves behind stalactites as dissolved mineral comes out of solution. The Tao Te Ching's chapter 78 makes the comparison directly, saying nothing is softer than water and yet nothing beats it at wearing down the hard.
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