The chinese characters are wu wei. wu means not. wei means doing, action, exertion. literally translated, non-doing. for centuries that is how it has come to english. and for centuries that translation has misled almost everyone who heard it.
Wu wei is not sitting still. it is not passivity. lao tzu, the legendary author of the tao te ching, used the phrase to describe sages who got more done than anyone, often by appearing to do almost nothing. the better translation is something like effortless action, or action without forcing, or the action that does not work against the grain of what's happening.
the picture
The classic taoist image is water. water does not fight the rock. it moves around the rock. it never strains. it never argues with the terrain. and yet over time, the water shapes the rock, wears it down, carves the canyon. softness wins, taoists kept saying. not because it is morally superior. because it does not waste itself fighting what cannot be fought.
Wu wei is what water does. constant motion with no resistance. continuous adjustment with no decision. every move is the move the situation is already asking for.
what most human effort is
The reason wu wei sounds strange is that it is the opposite of what most adult life trains you to do. most human effort is the rock side, not the water side. we push. we strain. we hold our ground. we override what is already trying to happen.
And we exhaust ourselves doing it. most of the daily fatigue of being a modern person is not the work itself. it is the friction between what we are forcing and what is actually unfolding. the closer the gap, the less tired you are. the wider the gap, the more drained.
The taoist observation is that the gap is almost always larger than you realize, and almost always closeable if you stop forcing.
what it isn't
This is not "don't try." it is not quietism. it is not giving up. it is not zen complacency, though pop culture has flattened it into all of those things.
It is more like the skill of a great dancer, a great surgeon, a great negotiator — people who have made so many small adjustments so fluently that, from the outside, it looks effortless. they are not being lazy. they are not refusing to act. they are acting with such precision that no excess motion happens. nothing fights. everything fits.
what it leaves you with
The question wu wei plants in a modern western mind is uncomfortable. where in your life are you forcing? what would change if you stopped pushing on the part that is not yours to push?
The answer almost always is that some part of the situation is asking for water, and you have been bringing rock.