by Clay Collins of Project Liberation and The Growing Life.

Please keep in mind some of these "anti-hacks" may not be practicable for you. These aren't "one size fits all" solutions.

1. Embrace Your Inner Dilettante, be Flaky, and Denounce the Cult of Permanence. After college graduation, we're allowed a couple years of experimental wiggle room. And when those years are oven we're supposed to semi-permanently stay put. We're supposed to stop vagabonding through life. We're supposed to sit down and shut up.

In this day and age, staying put in one's situation (i.e. one's career, job, company, city, town, etc.) is how you become an expert, advance in your field, and win the respect of your peers and family. We're fed the myth that staying put affords us dream jobs. And we want this permanence as well: we want tenure, we want seniority, we want bedrocks and sure things.

But radical and rapid-fire growth often happens when you have freedom to try new things. Rapid-fire growth doesn't require traveling across the country, starting a new business, or flooding your senses on a daily basis, but it often requires a high level of latitude. Radical growth often requires the ability to rapidly change directions, change contexts, and change situations. Rapidfire growth often requires a dilettante-esque mobility. And if you exercise this mobility enough, other may very well perceive you as someone who hasn't "found himself."

The problem is that post-higher-education life just isn't configured to encourage growth; it's configured to reward stagnation. We're rewarded for stagnating, for unnecessarily sticking with things.

2. Stop Hiding Behind the Comfort of Stepping Stones. So many of us live "stepping stone lives." We spend the majority of our waking hours working for goals that are merely stepping stones to other goals. For example:

We do well in high school so we can get into a good college.
We do well in college so we can get hired by a good company (or get into a good graduate school).
We do well at our jobs so we can get even better jobs and make more money.
We join committees to pad our resumes or impress our bosses.

(Question: what would your life be like if you cut out all the stepping stones?)

We are uncomfortable going after what we want in ways that aren't culturally or institutionally approved. But we would all do well to live courageously by directly going after what we want.

(I realize that not everyone has the luxury of avoiding stepping stones. If your dream requires a medical degree, for example, you'll need to suck it up and stay on those stones).

3. Pursue Self-Development over Productivity. Productivity often poses as self-development, but self-development and productivity can be two very different things. What is best for us as individuals can be bad for our on-the-job productivity.

4. Get to "Mind Like Water" the Original Way (i.e. Mindfulness). There is a myth among many productivity evangelists that productivity – or a productivity system – can lead to the meditative state likened to "mind like water.

"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.

"[I]f you get seriously far out of that state–and start to feel out of control, stressed out, unfocused, bored, and stuck–do you have the ability to get yourself back into it? That's where the methodology of [my productivity system] will have the greatest impact on your life, by showing you how to get back to "mind like water," with all your resources and faculties functioning at a maximum level. " - David Allen

The mind like water myth is the myth is that any productivity system can be the starting point for having "all your resources and faculties functioning at maximum level." The myth is that a water-tight task-handling methodology, an elaborate folder system, a clockwork method for handling your inbox, a label-maker, and a set of routines come first.

The "mind like water myth" is that that productivity — or a productivity system — is the path, and that mind like water is the destination. Bruce lee once said that "all fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability" and that "the possession of anything begins in the mind." I believe Bruce is right: possession of a "mind like water" begins in the mind. It's not productivity first, mind like water second. It's the other way around.

So what's the truest, most direct, and surest path to mind like water? I believe it is mindfulness gained through meditation (or whatever other internal and inward means we take to get there).

Believing that "mind like water" results from a productivity systems that obsessively organizes our external reality only perpetuates the rat race.

http://zenhabits.net/2008/07/8-great-anti-hacks-to-fundamentally-change-your-life/

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