The whole reason I even bothered with the I Ching’s Hexagram 31, the one they call “Influence” or “Mutual Attraction,” was because I screwed up a major project two years ago. Not just a little mess, I’m talking about a full-on, multi-year disaster that took my bank account with it and left me feeling like a total chump.
My old business model was all about pushing. I pushed the product. I pushed the features. I pushed the team to work faster. I pushed potential clients until they just plain old ran away. I thought hustle and brute force were the keys. Every meeting was an arm wrestle. Every sales pitch was a 90-minute monologue. I was the mountain, yeah, but I was pushing the whole damn thing, trying to shove the Earth into alignment with my demands. It wasn’t attraction; it was repression. The whole thing was a toxic, exhausted mess, and it finally cratered, leaving me with a serious load of debt and zero motivation.
I was done. I stopped everything. I spent a month just sitting on my porch, trying to figure out how I’d managed to work so hard and fail so spectacularly. It felt exactly like that time I got locked out of an important meeting because someone decided my input wasn’t “needed” anymore—suddenly invisible after years of effort. That feeling of being a repellent force, not an attractive one, that’s what drove me back to some of the weirder stuff I kept on my bookshelf. And that’s where I grabbed the I Ching.
The Hexagram 31 Practice: Stop Pushing, Start Being
I literally flipped open to Hexagram 31, Xian. The core idea is simple: the Mountain (Gēn, the Youngest Son) sits above the Lake (Duì, the Youngest Daughter). It’s about two young, receptive forces influencing each other not by force, but by position and feeling. The mountain is stable, and the lake is receptive. If the mountain is sturdy, the lake reflects it clearly. I realized I was just a chaotic, moving mountain, chasing a lake that kept running dry.
So, I decided to run a three-month test. I had nothing to lose. I formally dumped all the old, aggressive business baggage. I switched my entire mindset from ‘How do I force this deal?’ to ‘How do I simply define myself so that the right things naturally feel compelled to move toward me?’
The Implementation Steps I Took:
- I Defined My “Steadiness” (The Mountain): I stopped chasing ten different niche markets. I wrote down, on one single piece of paper, the single most valuable skill I offered—not what I wanted to sell, but what I inherently was good at. For me, it was solving a specific type of complex system failure. Nothing else. This was me planting my feet.
- I Created “Receptivity” (The Lake): I built a simple, ugly landing page. No pop-ups, no “BUY NOW!” buttons. Just a short paragraph that articulated the value I’d defined in step one, and then a contact form. That’s it. I promised myself I wouldn’t do any outbound sales or aggressive marketing. I refused to spam or cold-call. I sat back and practiced pure, patient waiting—which was incredibly difficult, believe me.
- I Adjusted My “Center of Gravity”: The text talks about the hexagram lines influencing different parts of the body—toes, calves, thighs, etc. I focused on the “heart” line, which is about the core intention. I checked my intent every morning: Was I desperate? Was I trying to trick someone? If the answer was yes, I corrected it. The only clean intention was to truly deliver the focused value.
For the first six weeks, nothing major happened. I felt like an idiot. I was getting ready to call the whole thing bunk and go back to the hustle. But then, the shift started.
A dude I met briefly years ago, someone I hadn’t pushed a business card on, someone I had zero connection with, emailed me. He saw my simple page—he said it “just popped up” when he was searching a specific issue. His opening line was, “I need exactly what you describe. No more, no less.”
We met. There was no sales pitch. There was no defensive posturing. He asked a few questions about my focused skill, and I answered honestly. He accepted my proposed rate immediately. The negotiation process, which used to take me days of phone tag and compromise, lasted less than an hour. The influence was instant, mutual, and clean. There was no friction because both parties were clear on what they were offering and what they were receptive to.
The whole thing worked because I finally stopped forcing the universe to give me what I wanted and instead focused on being the thing that the universe needed. That’s the real, simple meaning of Hexagram 31: attraction isn’t about volume; it’s about clear, steady positioning and pure receptivity. You just define your mountain and let the right lake naturally find its level with you. It took losing everything to finally get that message straight. And now, I’m sticking to this flow. It’s way less tiring.
