Antiquity had a way of condensing wisdom into a few sentences, unlike anything that followed, including this article!
Take a look at this second verse from the Isha Upanishad. I’m designing a whole product around Mindful Productivity, and yet these four lines convey the meaning of it all so effectively…
Always performing actions here,
Īśopaniṣad, verse 2
one may aspire to live a hundred years.
Thus for you there is no other way than this,
whereby action will not cling to you.
If action is the only means of living a life, then life is busyness manifest.
Like our belief in supplements over nutrition, sages condensed wisdom into bite-sized nuggets to make it palatable. Here is one from another culture, more crisp than the Upanishad!
“The day you cease to travel, you’ll have arrived.” – Japanese saying
If action is your vehicle, the destination is always on the move.
Because quantity tends to imply quality, modern philosophers buried their wisdom inside books, making it a game of treasure hunt.
Consider this quote from a philosopher who always kept a resignation letter handy in his drawer when he joined a company!
“Missing a train is only painful if you run after it!” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The author continues… “Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.”
🍪 Fortune Cookie:
Still, some wish if wisdom can be reduced to a newsletter.
It cannot. So says an entrepreneur, a modern incarnation of wisdom!
“If [more] information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” – Derek Sivers
That still leaves us with one way to seek cure for busyness. As a pill with no side effects.
That’s possible. And that’s called a skill.
In Mindful Productivity the pill for busyness is a skill called Decision Clarity Window!
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Nikhil Kabadi 