Play the Game of Life
Ryan Petersen's Blog

—Chinese Proverb

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I just came across this quote from Yvon Chouinard, founder and owner of Patagonia.

“I’ve been a student of Zen archery for many years. In Zen archery, for example, you forget about the goal—hitting the bull’s-eye—and instead focus on all the individual movements involved in shooting an arrow. You practice your stance, reaching back and smoothly pulling an arrow out of the quiver, notching it in the string, controlling your breathing, and letting the arrow release itself. If you’ve perfected all the elements, you can’t help but hit the center of the target. The same philosophy is true for climbing mountains. If you focus on the process of climbing, you’ll end up at the summit. As it turns out, the perfect place I’ve found to apply this Zen philosophy is the business world.”

If you haven’t seen his book, “Let My People Go Surfing: The education of a reluctant businessman,” you may want to check it out. He has some great insights on the importance of running a company according to your core values, treating the supply chain as an interdependent ecosystem, focusing on process and getting out of the way of his people.

Labels: business, process, quotes

"The very essence of intelligence is to act appropriately when a problem is not clearly defined and solutions are not evident. Itelligent human behavior in such situations is based on common sense, accumulated from lived experience."

- Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life

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"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of a crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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"A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both."

-- Francois Auguste Rene Chateaubriand

Labels: quotes