Often it's the cart before the horse

In this article: Which to master first, mindset or productivity technologies and business strategies and skills.

Acquiring knowledge, using productivity technologies, developing strategies and employing tactics and sharpening our business skills, is crucial.

Mindset mastery, relaxing the self-contraction, shifting from fear to passion, from 'have to' to 'want to' is essential.

But either by itself is going to get stuck.

An ease of mind is the bed rock of innovation, creativity, spontaneity and purpose, but they need to be shaped and guided in expression by technologies, strategies, tactics and skills.

A Chinese marital artist I met in a Taiwanese tea shop many years back had just finished a tour of South Africa with his young students. He told me they had won every competition, and when I asked him why, he answered. 'Because from day one we focus on both skill and mindset, not one before the other, and neither more important than the other. They both form part of an integral practice.'

But more than that, fear based technologies, strategies and skills differ considerably [in logic and outcomes] from those developed from a place of relaxed passion.

It's true they are both two sides of the same coin, and in children I would agree, teach both simultaneously. But for adults making the shift, I would argue that mindset is more important to master first, precisely because it changes the logic and nature of the productivity technologies, strategies, tactics and skills.

Ease of mind and consistent inquiry eventually results in clarity of purpose. And it's that raw purpose which is shaped and moulded and given strategic commercial expression.