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Zhuang Zhou and the 3 Cooks: How Less Effort Equals More Results
The ancient wisdom of “finding the joints” still holds true today
Do you find yourself feeling exhausted or anxious at the end of the day? Maybe halfway through the day? Do you wake up feeling like there’s too much to do, and you barely have the energy to get started?
Perhaps you’re hacking and cutting too much.
Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou tells the story of three kinds of cooks as a way to illustrate what I mean:
A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.
Zhuang Zhou’s parable is a metaphor for the way we can take on the tasks of daily life. We can essentially be one of the three kinds of cooks. We can cut, we…
