Float Like a Butterfly, Decide Like a Pro: Efficiency in Action

Martial arts movies have a lot to answer for.

They glamourised this balletic form of fighting that looks great on screen but doesn’t work in real life.

Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jackie Chan, and Bruce Lee would fly around the screen. Whirling combinations of punches and kicks taking out all attackers from any angle.

Watching actual professional fighters, they rarely spin or move with such ostentation. Their movements are direct and purposeful.

They don’t jump out of the way of attacks, they merely slip the punches.

Miyamoto Musashi

Musashi was a master swordsman who never lost a duel between the ages of 13 and 30 when he retired. He wrote The Book of Five Rings in 1643 to describe his philosophy about sword fighting but it has been used to understand strategy, leadership, and the challenges of human interaction.

He was a massive proponent of focusing on what is essential and discarding everything else.

It was about the efficiency of movement. In a battle for life or death, you want to make sure every one of your actions gets you either closer to victory or keeps you away from defeat.

No Wasted Movement

In a world where production is key, more is better than less. However, this doesn’t have a quality aspect to it. More defective things are worse than less useable things.

Every day we are given a choice of what to do. The project, client, or management might be asking for several things.

In this hypothetical world, you could come up with 10 things to do. Five of the tasks are easy to do but mostly pointless but you produce something to show for your effort. Two tasks are good, however, the last three actually move the needle.

If you do the last three, you have the least to show for yourself in terms of output but they are the most meaningful things to do.

The challenge is going from the showy balletic fighting style to the effective results-driven style.

From the outside, it looks much cooler doing the kicks and flips, but if you are trying to win, you want to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t and just slip that punch.