“If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening my axe.”
--Abraham Lincoln
This is one of my favorite quotes. It especially rings true in today’s fast-paced world where things never seem to slow down. Another big part of my love for it stems from the fact that it can be applied to almost any aspect of your life, whether it is your professional career, relationship with your partner/friends/family, or personal development. Let’s look at this idea of sharpening the axe both from a business perspective and a personal perspective. Hopefully it will spark some ideas for both.
The first example I will give is regarding the business side of it. A large part of my job involves visiting new customers and reviewing their current production process. Using an analogy, they will often say things like, “We have to chop down 50 trees a day and we can only manage to cut down 35. We are using all of our energy and strength and we are exhausted at the end of each day. You have to help us!”. Upon reviewing their process, I will notice that they are all using dull, blunt axes to chop down the trees. I will normally say something like, “Have you ever tried sharpening your axes so you can fell more trees, more easily?”
The response to this is normally one of two, the first is, “Sharpen our axes?! When are we going to find time to do that? Didn’t you just hear me say that we are working as hard as we can?!”. The second sounds a bit like, “We’ve been using those axes for decades, we’re sure there is nothing wrong with the axes, it has to be something else in the process. Those axes have worked fine for us.”
The companies that actually take the time to evaluate their current process, challenge the status quo, reflect on past experiences and design ways to improve the process are the ones that survive and thrive. The “It’s always been that way” and the “we don’t have time” companies are normally the ones that get left behind in the market.
It helps to have a fresh set of eyes on a process to avoid the whole pig-farmer/pig-farm-smell issue. However, if you don’t like consultants, develop an internal team to do this. Identify any process in your organization. If you already know of the painful ones you can start there but any will do. Set aside a four-hour meeting with any department personnel that is involved in the process. Take the first hour or so to map out the process with every step that is involved. Spend the next couple of hours asking questions about each step. Why is it this way? Is this the most efficient way? What would be one way to improve this? Is this step really necessary or are we missing a step we really should add?
Finish the meeting by developing answers to your questions and an action plan. Once you have identified ways to improve the process, set short-term, or Sprint, goals. What are some small changes you can make over the next 30, 60 and 90 days? How will you track those changes? Reconvene on those same mile markers (30, 60, 90 days) to review how effective the changes really were. I have seen companies that have set aside four hours to solve their problems and the solutions developed resulted in hundreds of saved hours. Take the time, sharpen the axe.
The second example is your personal development. I want to be clear here that sharpening the axe does not mean taking a vacation. Taking a vacation is simply putting down the dull axe while you spend a week at the beach thinking about all of the trees that are going to be left standing when you return. Then you come back, somewhat rejuvenated, pick up a dull axe and resume your daily whacking away at trunks. Sharpening the axe from a personal standpoint means bettering yourself.
This is one of the hardest things for people to do primarily because it normally doesn’t occur at your primary job and your primary job takes up a large part of your day. If you are like most people, you roll out of bed at the latest possible hour, maybe grab breakfast before leaving your house, sit in traffic for your morning commute, work eight, nine or even ten hours, sit in traffic on your commute home and arrive at the end of your day exhausted.
At the end of a long and busy day, the last thing most people want to do is then spend anytime exercising or mentally exercising their brains. They don’t want to read books and take online classes, they want to watch a mind-numbing tv show to forget about the day. I know this from first-hand experience! However, it’s the people who can find an hour or two in the morning or after work to dedicate to personal development that get ahead in life.
Einstein or someone said something like “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.” If you are stuck in the same daily grind, how can you expect your life to be any different in five years or even a year from now?
Even if your idea of success isn’t the cliched fame and money, sharpening the axe can have huge benefits for your overall well-being. If you feel overwhelmed or inadequate at your job, odds are you probably come home at the end of the day feeling the same. Stressed out at the amount of work you have to do or anxious about your (most of the time) self-perceived inadequacy. This can be paralyzing. The first thing you want to do is probably eat ice cream and forgot about life and the last thing you feel like doing is more work.
This is what I call the Three Mile Problem. In short, it is when you have to put up with a more unpleasant state for a short-period that, if gone through, leads to a more enjoyable state in the long-term. My example of three miles pertains to running. When I start running my body immediately disagrees with me. It is sending every signal possible for me to cease and desist. However, while that is unpleasant and much worse than if I just sat on the couch, something incredible happens around mile three. My body hits a stride. I enter a state of flow and I can continue running for several more miles without noticing any pain.
The same goes for personal development. If you are overwhelmed at work, you don’t feel like getting home and taking online classes to learn Microsoft Excel. Your brain will enter story-telling mode to get you out of it. BUT! If you can push through, you will eventually understand how to use Excel much more effectively which may make your day job much easier since you spend all of your time manually manipulating spreadsheets and now you know how to automate that. Endure the pain upfront for the long-term benefits.
Right now, you may be thinking, “this is the best thing I have ever read, but what can I do to start? What are some examples of personal development tasks I can begin doing to start down that path?”. Well here is a boatload of examples that you can start doing as part of your morning routine or at night after work.
- Read more books
- Listen to educational or informative podcasts
- Watch educational documentaries or shows
- Attend seminars and summits
- Take online classes or night classes on a subject
- Use apps that are educational
- Have a deep conversation with an intellectual person you admire
- Find a mentor and get feedback
- Exercise regularly
- Meditate
- Pick up a new and challenging hobby
Life is too short to simply skate through it. Get out of your comfort zone and learn something new. Take time every day to sharpen your axe and be a better version of yourself.
