Practical Enlightenment

Chop Wood, Carry Water

Why Should I Have Beginner’s Mind?

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.

—Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind¹

MOST PEOPLE THINK it is important to have a lot of knowledge, and they go to great lengths to try to impress others with how much they know. In this deservedly famous passage, Suzuki Roshi pointedly emphasized the limitations of such an attitude toward knowledge and experience in the spiritual life. It is the same in business life. In order to understand what my customers want and need, I must cultivate a beginner’s mind. For them to teach me, I have to clear space to learn.

There’s an old Zen story of a professor who visits a renowned Zen master and, instead of learning, goes on about what he himself knows. The master fills the professor’s cup of tea—and keeps on pouring. When the professor asks what the master is doing, the master tells him, “Like this cup, you are full. How can I teach you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

If you want to open yourself to Suzuki’s “many possibilities,” abandon preconceptions; ask thoughtful questions; and above all, listen and learn. This is true whether approaching a new employee, a new task, a new career, or a new challenge in the marketplace. There are times when the smartest businesspeople put aside what they think they know and adopt beginner’s mind.

How Can You Use Your Buddha Mind to Establish Priorities?

The wise person, who hurries when it’s time to hurry, and who slows his pace down when slowness is the thing, is deeply happy because he’s got priorities in line.

—Theragatha 161

PETER DRUCKER, the grandfather of today’s management consultants and business thinkers, says the challenge of the modern manager is that he knows there are ten things needing to be done, but he has time to do only six. He’s got to pick the right six to do, and then go home at night and not worry about the four he had to let go.

The Buddha would tell us that Drucker’s statement applies to everyone, not just managers. We work in fast motion, and there are many demands on our time. The task is not to somehow find more time but rather to make the most of the time we have. Our real challenge is not short time but effective prioritization.

We must each choose what is most important to our happiness and to our success, in life and in work. Time-management experts offer a variety of useful tools and techniques. Some examples: Use an A, B, C ranking to sort projects and tasks into categories; then do the A-priority things first, B-priority things next, and C-priority things only if you have time left over. Or, distinguish between urgent and important, and then do things that are both urgent and important first, followed by those that are important but not urgent; items that are not important and not urgent—don’t do them.

If you’re having trouble prioritizing your work, ask someone to help you—your boss or a trusted coworker. Often, we can see what others need to do more clearly than we can see what we need to do, so getting another’s perspective can be a wise move. Wise workers know how to tap into the wisdom of others.

Once we have made our choices, our daily actions follow from them. Instead of racing around frantically, treating everything like an emergency, we hurry when it is appropriate, and we slow down when that is appropriate. This is harder than it sounds. We make different choices and have different insights in these different speed modes. We need to use both in mindful work.

How Does Mindfulness Help with Time Management?

Yunmen addressed his monks and said, “I do not ask about before the 15th of the month; tell me about after the 15th.” Nobody said anything, so he answered himself: “Every day is a good day.”

—The Blue Cliff Record, case 6

ZEN TEACHER YUNMEN does not ask his people about the past; he knows the past is gone and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Yet he is not asking about the future, either, for he also knows that no one can predict the future. He is testing to see if they are worrying uselessly about time, past or future. He is asking about now, the moment of awakening. Concerned and perplexed, the monks do not answer.

Perhaps we can do better. Yunmen is trying to teach them (and us) that it is pointless to expend energy lamenting the past or worrying about the future when we cannot control either one. It is pointless to divide up our years and days, living as if we were calendars. From a pure Zen perspective, there is no future or past. We’re not like calendars—we’re more like clocks. We tell the time as it happens. Our hands are always pointing to now. There is no 15th, nor any day before or after. All we really have to work with is today, and today is a good day.

If the Buddha told us to “have a nice day,” he would not be making small talk; he would be challenging us to do it. The heart of effective time management was, is, and will be mindfulness of this moment.

Does the Buddha Have Any Wisdom about Procrastination?

“It’s too cold, too hot, too late.”
With excuses like these,
People shirk their work,
And the moment passes them by.

           —Theragatha 231

WHO AMONG US isn’t guilty of procrastination? It’s so seductive and seems so harmless when we succumb to it. “Oh, I’ll get to that project later. I don’t have time to do it now.” “Who can work in this heat?” “I’ll make those phone calls tomorrow. It’s too late in the day; I’m sure everyone’s already gone home.” “I’ll just take care of these little things first and save the big one for when I have a bigger chunk of time.” Sure, uh-huh. Some of these reasons may even hold a grain of truth. Unfortunately, all too many times, the window of opportunity closes, and we kick ourselves (or someone else kicks us) for having missed our chance.

The wise person knows the dangers of procrastination and resists the siren song that tells her to put off ’til tomorrow. Put things off even once, and you begin to establish a pattern flowing from your inner resistance. If others, feeling similarly, follow your lead, you’ve created a whole culture of procrastination. Your team begins to lag behind.

In place of this, the wise person looks directly into her procrastination and sees the resistance underlying it. She knows that resistance is not only normal but valuable: she asks where resistance comes from, knowing she will learn something vital about herself and her relation to the work at hand. She may enlist the help of others in overcoming her resistance: she asks her coach or mentor for help, or she teams up with an action buddy—someone she can call on whenever she needs support in tackling something she’s having trouble doing. She learns and then she acts, making the moment count. Acting mindfully in the moment, we stay ahead of the curve and are able to set the terms; we flow with the Tao (Chinese for the “way,” the movement of all things). If the Buddha spoke Latin, he might have said, “Carpe diem!”

What Can You Do about Too Much E-mail?

It is completely open,
Nothing wanting, nothing extra.
Hold or reject and
You lose its thusness.

        —Sengcan, “Trusting in Mind”

THE THIRD ZEN Ancestor, Sengcan, describes the great way, the path of the sages. No “too much” here. It is we who create categories such as “too much” and “too little.” In the Buddha mind there is only what is—no evaluations of excess or insufficiency—and since there are no evaluations, there is also no distress caused by judgments and assessments, nothing wanting and nothing extra.

This may sound crazy to the modern working person’s mind, brimming with judgments, evaluations, and criticisms. Our problem is, we tell ourselves (and each other) stories about how things “should” be and then get upset because things don’t occur as we prefer. Our “shoulds” and “oughts” cause us to suffer. We may object, “This isn’t the life I ordered,” but things in our lives are not under our command. Life occurs on life’s terms—not on yours, not on mine. The Buddha mind surveys your e-mail, the piles of paper on your desk, the work in your briefcase, and simply says, “Thus.” The Buddha mind does not suffer, because it has no preconceived ideas about the volume of e-mail … or anything else. Without suffering, we are free to tackle the e-mail itself without the distraction of holding on to our imaging reality or rejecting our actual reality. We are free to find the ease of openness.

How Can We Avoid Wasting Time in Cyberspace?

The Web site you seek
cannot be located, but
endless others exist.

—Joy Rothke, in “Haiku Error Messages,”
from 21st Century Challenge #4, Salon.com

THE BUDDHA WOULD profoundly appreciate the infinite world of cyberspace and its endless possibilities. He would see in it a reflection of the infinite universe around us: vast, complex, marvelous to behold, each tiny piece of the great Web potentially linked to every other. Disordered, ceaselessly changing, vulnerable to attack, finally indestructible, the Web indeed reflects our world.

And just because it reflects our world, we can get lost in it. We succumb to the lure of following just one more link, checking out just one more site. Here are a few tips for breaking this cycle: First, no personal Web activity at work. In fact, this is not a tip; this is a rule. Second, set a timer on surfing. You know the expression “There’s an app for that”? Well, there are several. Use one. Third, every 15 minutes or so, ask yourself, “What’s the best use of my time, right now?” Answer honestly. (You can use this tip all day, not just online.) Finally, whenever you even wonder if being online is productive, that’s your cue to get up and walk away from your computer.

Just as we can never satisfy our endless desire for worldly pleasures, so can we never satisfy our endless desire for virtual pleasures. The Web site you seek cannot be located. You can use your senses to search for pleasure or you can use search engines, but your satisfaction will come only when you search within and find no one to satisfy. Luckily, though the Web site cannot be located, neither can the user.

How Can You Do Your Job of Selling—without Selling Out?

The great cloud rains down on all beings,
whether their nature is superior or inferior.

                                   —Lotus Sutra 5

SALESPEOPLE ARE THE rainmakers for their companies. Rainmakers do their magic dance, bringing nourishing rain to grow their businesses. It is not for them to judge but to serve.

Essential to any effective rainmaker’s dance are the attention, interest, and kindness he shows his customers. If he is wise and compassionate (remember that these are the two great virtues of Buddhism), he doesn’t make sales calls—he makes service calls. He knows that his primary job is to help his customers become more successful—his job is to provide what his customers need. When he rains kindness on his customer, his customer rains appreciation in the form of money on the rainmaker and his company. In this valuesdriven business model, serving others is fundamental, and money is the by-product of providing service.

A rainmaker not in his right mind—that is, his Buddha mind—has lost sight of the essence of business. Such a salesperson thinks the goal is getting what he can from his customers; he has made money his object of worship and will go to any lengths to get it. Such a rainmaker has sold his soul for success, but he doesn’t really succeed at all. Customers are smart, and sooner or later they will realize that he isn’t interested in serving them at all; he is interested simply in what he can get from them. His customers are likely to switch vendors when they can, preferring to do business with a salesperson who genuinely cares about their needs.

A rainmaker who is wise and compassionate embodies those virtues even in the act of selling. Does that seem odd? Only because we have falsely divorced virtue from the market. In fact, selling goods or services that you know are useful is wise. Selling them to people who can genuinely benefit from them is compassionate. This works the same way as right speech, which communicates something true and useful at the right time. Here we have right sales, selling something harmless and useful to the right person. This is the basis of a Buddhist economy.

What Would the Buddha Tell Us about Handling a Highly Distasteful job?

The Buddha said if we really need to,
We have to do some really nasty things.
But never just because someone has asked.

—The Precious Jewel of the Teaching 12,
quoting the Ratnavali

SOMETIMES WE ARE asked to do things at work that we really don’t want to do. Somebody has to do the grunt work, and sometimes that somebody is you. The distasteful task might be a special project, or it might be part of your regular duties. Distasteful jobs can include firing people, cutting budgets, dealing with conflicts, cleaning up messes, working with difficult circumstances and/or difficult people. These jobs can be physically nasty, emotionally nasty, morally nasty; every organization has its share of nasty jobs and unpleasant duties that someone has to do.

But nasty jobs raise an interesting question for people following the wisdom of the Buddha. He says that just because you are asked to do such a job does not mean you necessarily have to do it. What, is he crazy? How can you not do a nasty job you are asked to do at work? What will your boss say?

We all need to shoulder responsibility, and we all have to do our share of nasty jobs, but we do not have to do them all, and we do not have to do them just because someone asks us. The Buddha tells you to ask, “Is this something I really need to do?” Your answer to that question will grow from your answers to the question’s several dimensions: “Does this job genuinely need to be done? Am I the best person in the organization to do this job? Is doing this job a test I need to pass?” And finally, perhaps the most important question: “Can I learn from the process of doing this job?”

If you can learn from a nasty job, you do need to do it. If the nasty job seems pointless and you see no redeeming aspects to it whatsoever, you might want to have a conversation with your boss and see if you can negotiate some other arrangement. Easier said than done, granted, but the practice of having such a discussion with your boss can be a powerful learning experience in itself. It just may be that the nasty task is not the only learning experience—how you think about and respond to the nasty task may be the real learning opportunity.