“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”
This nugget of wisdom, widely attributed to our 16th president and often quoted by management gurus and self-help heroes, is anything but wise. For starters, you have no idea how sharp the axe will need to be at the beginning…
The edge might be just fine. Next, once you start chopping, your axe is going to get dull. In fact, if you spend too much time sharpening your axe, it’s likely to be so sharp that the metal edge chips off right away, in the same way that over-sharpening a pencil often ends up to a be a pointless exercise. All that time spent sharpening wears away needlessly at the metal and misses the this key truth: you don’t know how sharp your axe needs to be until you start chopping.
Although lacking in poetic grandeur, a wiser man might have said something like, “give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I’d stop to sharpen my axe whenever it got dull.” But honest Abe wasn’t interested in wisdom, what he wanted was grandeur and control, which he was willing to pursue by any means necessary.