“Everything has [already] been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.”
-Raoul Vaneigem

In 2005, NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman injected a bestselling hit, The World is Flat, into the national psyche. The book’s 5th “flatting” factor is outsourcing. Friedman argues that the practice enables companies to componentize manufacturing and service efforts, thus making each component more efficient and cost effective.

In August of 2005, author A.J. Jacobs (author of The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically) read Friedman’s book and thought to himself, “why should Fortune 500 firms have all the fun?” “Why can’t I join in on the biggest business trend of the new century?” “Why can’t I outsource my low-end tasks? Why can’t I outsource my life?” He then goes on to write a notable piece of cultural history for Esquire called My Outsourced Life (notable because it later catches on in a big way). In My Outsourced Life, Jacobs outsources everything from worrying and spousal relations, to email and work related research. It’s an entertaining read and one that I recommend.

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All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.
-Bruce Lee

In Getting Things Done, productivity guru David Allen discuses the benefits of having a "Mind Like Water." Here’s the quotation . . .

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 appropriately to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn’t overreact or underreact.
-David Allen

He then explains why Mind Like Water is beneficial. . .

Anything that causes you to overreact or underreact can control you, and often does. Responding inappropriately to your e-mail, your staff, your projects, your unread magazines, your thoughts about what you need to do, your children, or your boss will lead to less effective results than you’d like. Most people give either more or less attention to things than they deserve, simply because they don’t operate with a "mind like water."
-David Allen

A Mind Like Water is a beautiful thing and a grounded mode of existence. I’ve been there before, and it’s great. I want to make this one thing clear: the possibility of having a mind like water is not, itself, a myth.

So what is the Mind Like Water Myth? Here goes . . .

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Whether it’s someone smacking their gum or an acquaintance who won’t stop calling, everyone has to deal with frustrating distractions getting in the way of their goals.

Tennis player John McEnroe was a master at leveraging his frustrations (usually directed towards chair umpires) to motivate him to battle through difficult matches, helping him win 17 grand slam titles.

McEnroe went too far, but he teaches us that frustrations can be harnessed to increase performance. The trick is to know when and how frustrations should be leveraged.

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Among the normal array of equipment in David Allen’s office, one item stands out. It is an hourglass with two minutes of sand. Any clock would serve equally well to mark the strict interval GTD gives us to process something the first time we handle it, but Allen’s hourglass is as much a talisman as a practical tool. In a medieval painting, it would symbolize death. Here, the hourglass is a symbol of virtue. It regulates our attention. It guards our self-esteem. The guru of Getting Things Done is living by the standards of the future, and his hourglass is an icon of an emerging civilization whose exacting demands we may all someday be expected to meet.

-Gary Wolf

Like an 800 calorie bag of potato chips unwittingly polished off during CSI, we often scarf down large quantities of time when we are unaware. Psychologists have demonstrated that the brain has a terrible sense of time when it is paying attention to something else, and as a result, we are most likely to mismanage and misuse time when we are the busiest.

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