“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”
-Abraham Maslow
Do you know how to properly eat a grapefruit?
Sure, opinions vary – but there is one method I’ve found superior to all others, and surprisingly, 80% of my friends had never heard of it (four out of five isn’t very scientific – but stick with me).
Some people cut it in half and use a tea spoon to smash the fruit, while others peel it and attempt to eat the juicy pulp by pulling it away from the pith (that white, sour stuff).
There’s a better tool for the job – the grapefruit spoon.
Never heard of it? Neither have most of my friends – and many of them enjoy grapefruit juice, but don’t eat grapefruits because it’s too difficult!
A grapefruit spoon has one important difference separating it from “normal” spoons. The end of it is pointed like a triangle, and the sides of it are serrated. This provides a number of advantages.
With a grapefruit spoon, eating grapefruits goes from being a chore to being a pleasure. I casually separate the pulp from the pith, and scoop it up to eat. Unlike “smashing it with a spoon” the risk for a stray geyser of fruit juice to the eye is minimized. Innocent bystanders no longer flee in terror at the sight of a grapefruit (to some, this may be considered a disadvantage).
Finally, I think it looks cool.
Don’t Be Held Back By The Tools
I think there are a few important lessons to be learned here that apply to many aspects of our lives, starting with this –
- If You Don’t Look For The Tools, You’ll Never Find Them. My friends never considered that there might be a better way. They assumed that the way they’d always eaten grapefruit was the only way there was.
- There Often Is An Easier Way. Some of my friends suffered and ate grapefruits the hard way – manually peeling it, or struggling with a regular teaspoon. Don’t make things harder on yourself than they have to be – seek out the right tools for the job.
- Don’t Overcomplicate. The spoon I’ve displayed is the one I use. I think it’s beautiful. It’s simply designed to handle one task well, and just by taking a look at it you can figure out how it works. There are a number of other different corers and scoops I have seen that may do the job and then some – but all I want is a tool that gets me my grapefruit. So often (especially in the productivity field) we overcomplicate our lives with fancy gadgets, different task lists, color coded folders and systems – when all we need is a simple strategy for accomplishing our goals.
Information As Tools
One trap I often see (and, let’s be honest – fall into myself) is reading and absorbing new information without applying it. That doesn’t do anybody any good – knowledge needs to be applied to have any effect on my goals.
Information is a tool. I don’t buy books because of fancy covers or because I like the smell of them (though I do enjoy it) – I buy them for specific tools I can use to improve myself. My favorite personal development books reflect this: they’re thoughtfully written and contain tons of great ideas to change my perspective, but they were all actionable. Every single one of those books is on my bookshelf today, and not a month (if even a week) goes by without me opening each and every one of them to keep the ideas fresh in my mind.
Every strategy I pick up and apply to my life improves me in some way – whether it helps me get more motivated, or helps me improve a particular fault, or perhaps simply shows me a better way to be organized.