All I needed was more time

It has been some time since I shared a Mulla Nasrudin story, so here is one for your delectation.

The Mulla bought a donkey. Someone told him that he would have ti give it a certain amount of food every day. This he considered to be too much. He would experiment, he decided, to get it used to less food. Each day, therefore, he reduced its rations.
Eventually, when the donkey was reduced to almost no food at all, it fell over and died.
‘Pity’, said the Mulla. ‘If I had had a little more time before it died I could have got it accustomed to living on nothing at all.’

This one is dedicated to all those (with or without black belts) who seek for efficiency at the cost of effectiveness and who advocate year on year reduction in cost.