Big Idea Daily | Getting Things Done
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The Art of Stress-Free Productivityby David Allen |
“Teaching you how to be maximally efficient and relaxed, whenever you need or want to be, was my main purpose in writing this book.”DAVID ALLEN |
BIG IDEA
Mind like water
FROM THE BOOK“In karate there is an image that’s used to define the position of perfect readiness: “mind like water.” Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond.
How does the water respond? The answer is, totally and appropriately to the force and mass of the input, then it returns to calm. It doesn’t overreact or underreact.
The power of a karate punch comes from speed, not muscle; it comes from a focused “pop” at the end of the whip. That’s why petite people can learn to break boards and bricks with their hands: it doesn’t take calluses or brute strength, just the ability to generate a focused thrust with speed. But a tense muscle is a slow one. So the high levels of training in the martial arts teach and demand balance and relaxation as much as anything else. Clearing the mind and being flexible are key.”
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Brian's Notes
How’s your mind?
Like a still pond? Or with tons of turbulence?
Learning how to relax, clear our minds and show up with flexibility and calm power is where it’s at.
Reminds me of Dan Siegel’s wisdom from Mindsight (see Notes). Dan is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists + psychotherapists and the core of his work is reaching a state of what he calls “integration.”
Here’s how he describes the optimal state of integration: “Now the qualities of an integrated flow spelled a universally memorable word: FACES, for Flexible, Adaptive, Coherent, Energized, and Stable. We can say that any healthy complex system has a FACES flow. In other words, when the self-organizational movement of the system is maximizing complexity, it attains a harmonious flow that is at once flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable…
I like to imagine the FACES flow as a river. The central channel of the river is the ever-changing flow of integration and harmony. One boundary of this flow is chaos. The other boundary is rigidity. These are the two banks of the river of integration.”
Kinda like that still pond, eh?
Only this river is flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized and stable.
THAT’s the ultimate aim of adopting David’s GTD methodology.
Big Ideas
01: CLEAR HEADS
02: 2 KEY OBJECTIVES
03: MIND LIKE WATER
04: MAKE IT UP.
05: THE 2-MINUTE GAME
“If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything.”SHUNRYU SUZUKI |
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