David Allen: Definition of a black belt
What a great way to end the work week! I had the opportunity to chat with David Allen and Eric Mack via Skype yesterday afternoon. They were holed up in Eric’s Digital Sandbox enjoying one of their “geek days” - playing with all sorts of cool gear and driving around in the mountains of California in David’s Mini. We chatted about Getting Things Done, how it’s impacted my company, and me personally. Great fun!
In the course of the conversation, we talked about the notion of achieving black belt status in GTD. For those of you familiar with David’s book, you know he uses a number of martial arts metaphors in his work. When he asked me what belt I thought I had attained I replied that I felt I wavered between brown and black belt, depending on how well I was working my system at any given time.
David shared this definition of black belt with me - something his Karate teacher imparted to him:
“You are a black belt when you have achieved a level of proficiency that allows you train yourself when you get out of shape. That is, you have enough self-awareness to know you have fallen out of rhythm and sufficient mastery of the art to get yourself back to proper form.”
I told David that would make a great blog post and he should share that. He replied “Go for it”.
Cool.