The Fastest Way to Chop Down a Tree
Long ago, there was a tree chopping competition. Two lumberjacks decided to race, seeing who could chop down a tree first. They go deep into the forest and find two equally big trunks, agreeing to start at sunup and go to sundown.
The first day, the morning comes, and both get started, chopping hard. By the late afternoon, one of them sits down, back turned, and rests. He gets up as the sun is setting and calls it a night. The other man is feeling good. After all, he got way more time in since he didn’t need to rest like his fellow competitor.
The next day, the same thing happens. Both men chop the morning away, but by the evening the first man takes his rest and finishes early. The second man is starting to feel confident, sure he will win.
On the final day, just as the sun is reaching its peak, the second man, hard at work, hears a tree fall behind him. Shocked, he turns around to see the first man grinning over his felled tree. Confused, the man who has just lost begins shouting at his competitor, blaming him for cheating, for how could he have done the same job, so quickly, while he gave up early each night?
The first man simply explained that he was not, in fact, resting, but was actually sharpening his axe, so that it would be optimally effective the next morning.
Take the necessary time to rest, recover, heal, and hone. A dull axe is far less effective than a sharp one. The quickest way to solve a problem is also often the quickest way to make extra work down the line, which ultimately negates the time savings.
“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.” - Beverley Sills
Especially in today’s age of AI, a quick and (AI-generated) dirty solution will not get you far without serious knowledge of what you’re building and how it works under the hood. Don’t get me wrong, start simple. A “prototype”-first approach will prevent unnecessary complexity from entering the system without actual problems to apply that complexity to. But if that framework is built by AI with little to no human oversight or intervention, you are taking a risky gamble of building your house on mud rather than a solid foundation.
Similarly, the rat race has many people thinking that working long, hard hours is the quickest way to the top. Well, my concern is twofold. First, the burnout is real and chases at your heels. As you tirelessly put in overtime hours and grasp at corporate benchmarks, your bandwidth is slipping. Your quality of work is declining. Your axe is getting dull. Our brains need time to rest, to be bored, to wander. That’s where the best ideas come from. Always hone your tools and be prepared for the next day’s challenge.
Second, you may very well realize from the top of the ladder that the rungs you climbed came at a steep cost: the days, weeks, and years of your youth, your life. We only live this life once, and
“how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” -Annie Dillard
If you want to spend your life with your nose against the grindstone, by all means, be my guest. But you won’t catch me toiling away for a future that isn’t guaranteed. I intend to enjoy the fruits of my labor while my body is young, my mind sharp, and my enjoyment readily available. I intend to spend each night sharpening my axe, not only for the efficiency of chopping my tree down the fastest, but also for the enjoyment of watching the golden sun shining on a solid day's work.
