Bruce Lee: Productivity Dragon

grant — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:33:30 -0400

The aptly named "Positivity Blog" recently had a rather compelling overview of Bruce Lee, Productivity Guru.

Like our own dear Merlin, Mr. Lee was from the Bay Area and took a lifelong interest in the fundamental rules underlying systems; unlike Mr. Mann, Bruce Lee could break Chuck Norris in half but never once listened to Zen Arcade.

What's more impressive, though, is how much of the Little Dragon's martial arts philosophy can be applied to pretty much everything. I'm especially fond of #4 on Positivity's list (“Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.”), but probably need to work most on #2:

Quote:

“It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.”

“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”

If you want to improve your life then it’s tempting to want to add more.

...Removing clutter and activities, tasks and thoughts that are not so important frees up time and energy for you to do more of what you really want to do. And as the clutter in your outer world decreases the clutter in your inner world also has a tendency to decrease....

Adding more thoughts and thinking things over for the 111th time may create a sense of security. It’s also a good way to procrastinate and to avoid taking that leap you know you should take. And the more you think, the harder it gets to act.

I'm not going to argue with that.

”Bruce Lee: Productivity Dragon” was written by grant balfour for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on May 09, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Everything I needed to know, I learned in the 1600s.

grant — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:23:12 -0500

It's taken as a given that we now deal with more information than previous generations ever imagined, living lives in which "number of clicks" is a meaningful measure of time. As Spanish productivity guru Balthasar Gracian says:

There is more required nowadays to make a single wise man than formerly to make Seven Sages, and more is needed nowadays to deal with a single person than was required with a whole people in former times.

Except he wrote that in the 17th century.

I first heard about Balthasar Gracian's The Art of Worldly Wisdom from an old friend - the mother of a girl I grew up with. Later, I went into a pretty good bookstore with a couple of college buddies and asked the guy behind the counter if they had any copies. He got very excited and said, "Gracian's Manual? Why, that's been an underground classic for four hundred years!"

I'm continually surprised at how much it remains underground, since it's really quite useful in almost every way. It's a collection of aphorisms - short little bits of advice - so maybe it's just permanently unfashionable. Gracian was a Jesuit scholar, army chaplain, philosopher, raconteur and novelist, and his most famous little book is something like a cross between D.T. Suzuki's digestible Zen Buddhism, Machiavelli's political scheming, Dale Carnegie's personal diplomacy, Schmidt & Eno's Oblique Strategies and Sun Tzu's advice on overcoming conflict.

If you're interested in increasing your mindfulness and basically putting things in order, there are worse books to keep on your nightstand. Or, you know, bookmarked for a quick glance between projects.

”Everything I needed to know, I learned in the 1600s.” was written by grant balfour for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 07, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"