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Have you ever been frustrated by the amount of time it is going to take between now and the time where you can cross a goal off your list? You might have heard this before, but, the time required to accomplish your goals is going to pass whether you are working towards your goals or not.

As a side note if you don’t have a list you should definitely make one.

You might say “Well, I would have to go back to school to do what I want to do.” or “I’m too old now to do what I want to do” I would ask you why you are making excuses to not follow your dreams.

But, I also want to share this with you…

“If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe”. ~Abraham Lincoln

By studying about what you want to do, you aren’t losing time on doing what you want to do. If you want to be a writer, study writing. If you want to be a web designer, study coding and design. If you want to be an artist, study art. Find the masters and make exact copies of what they did. Will you be able to show this work to anyone? No. But, you will be able to make something new from what you have learned.

But remember this; Time spent sharpening the ax is not a waste IF you eventually start chopping down trees. This is the catch in many productivity blogs. If you spend your time constantly revising your strategy to work at your maximum potential, you won’t actually work.

We are driven to think that there is a perfect way to do things. We spend all our time looking for what the perfect way might be. All that time looking for perfection and we don’t even accomplish adequate? Adequate is better than nothing any day.

There is a whole group of people that subscribe to “lifehacking” methods. That term still sounds weird to me, but I appreciate the philosophy and methods. I like to look at it as an idea that we have a “smart side” of ourselves and a “stupid side”. In being smart, the smart side of the brain has to plan for and anticipate how the stupid side can mess it up.

My best illustration of a “life hack” is waking up in the morning. The smart side of me knows I need to wake up at a certain time in the morning, but when the morning comes, the stupid side of me is going to rationalize why I can just stay in bed. So, every evening my smart side has to plan the time to wake up, but also has to plan how I can get my stupid side to stop rationalizing more sleep. I put the alarm clock on the other side of the room with a note about what I need to do at that time. That is a life-hack.

For sharpening the ax, the “smart-side” will plan out a good growth activity by looking for a new method to be more productive or learn more. I believe it is the stupid side that begins to take over and keeps us on the search for more and more productive ways of doing things without actual getting the work done.

Life-hacking is like a kaizen method that continues while you work as opposed to stopping what you are doing before you have the perfect method. It’s a way of sharpening while you cut.

Don’t err too much on either side. If you sharpen your ax every time you take a swing, you will never get one tree chopped down. If you keep on swinging with dull ax, the tree will win and you will lose.

So, in life, get your ax nice and sharp. Then knock down a tree. If you noticed the ax getting dull at the end of that tree, then sharpen [adjust your methods] and chop down the next tree.

Continue into the forest.

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