If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first six seconds sharpening the axe

Which advice from a close peer had the most negative impact on your career?

That's a good way to start an essay, indeed. It is a question that I spent quite some time reflecting on, and I wasn't able to decide. So I did what I think Abraham Lincoln (or whoever the author of the quote is) should have done and just picked the first one from the list.

The morning light catches the dust motes in my home office, and I'm thinking about axes. About preparation. About the weight of good intentions that press down on our shoulders until we can barely move. Six seconds. Not six hours. The misquote feels more honest somehow, like accidentally saying what you really mean when you're drunk.

I remember the dojo smell—that particular mix of sweat and floor polish that gets into your clothes and follows you home. My sensei, a compact man with hands like weathered leather, would demonstrate a throw once, maybe twice. Then he'd step back, arms crossed, watching us practice the movement alone. "A thousand times," he'd say. "Practice it a thousand times before you try it with a partner. The body must know the shape before it meets resistance."

The shape. I loved that phrase. As if movements were sculptures, we carved from the air.

Years later, shuffling cards in my apartment, I'd think about shapes again. The fingers learning their secret choreography, the misdirection that happens in the space between what the audience sees and what actually occurs. The magic forums were adamant: never show a trick until you can do it in your sleep. Practice alone. Perfect the illusion before risking it in front of real eyes.

Both pieces of advice made such beautiful sense. They felt like wisdom, like the kind of thing you'd needlepoint onto a pillow or post on LinkedIn with a sunrise photo.

They were also, I realize now, watching that dust dance in the morning light, clever excuses that we were proud of sharing, rather than the results.

Not the advice itself—there's truth in repetition, in private practice. But the timeline. The isolation. The idea that we must achieve some mythical state of readiness before we deserve to inhabit the world with our imperfect attempts.

There's a particular kind of paralysis that comes from being smart enough to see the gap between where you are and where you want to be. You develop what Ira Glass called taste faster than you develop skill, and suddenly, you're trapped in the space between vision and execution. You become a connoisseur of your own inadequacy.

I think about the photography students—half graded on taking one perfect photo, half graded on taking a hundred. The ones who took a hundred, their photos scattered across darkroom tables like fallen leaves, they're the ones who learned what light actually does when it meets a surface. The perfect photo group spent their semester in committee meetings with their own anxiety.

My hands remember the shape of failed throws. How many times did I practice that hip rotation alone, feeling the movement groove itself into muscle memory? A thousand? More? When I finally tried it with a partner, I discovered that bodies have opinions about physics that air doesn't. My perfectly practiced throw crumbled on contact with an actual human who had their own center of gravity and their own ideas about balance.

The magic was worse. I'd spend months perfecting a routine in my mirror, my reflection the only audience that mattered. The patter polished, the sleights invisible even to my own hypercritical eye. But mirrors don't gasp. They don't lean forward or look away at the wrong moment. They don't have seven-year-old daughters who ask loudly, "Why are you holding the cards weird?"

There's this moment in every creative endeavor—I've started calling it the cliff dive. It's when you realize that all your preparation is just you standing on the edge, toes curled over stone, staring at water that might be six feet deep or sixty. And the only way to know is to jump.

But we don't jump. We sharpen axes.

God, the axes we sharpen. The business plans that never become businesses. The novels outlined in such intricate detail that actually writing them would feel like coloring inside lines already drawn. The course materials gathered, the domain names purchased, and the logos designed for companies that exist only in the carefully curated museums of our imagination.

I have a friend who's been "almost ready" to launch her consulting practice for three years. Her website is gorgeous. Her methodology is bulletproof. Her fear is exquisite in its creativity—each week brings a new reason why she needs just a little more time. Another certification. Another case study. Another revision of her already-perfect pitch deck. She is the best coach as long as she doesn't start coaching.

Watching her is like watching myself in a mirror that reflects across time.

The thing about spending six hours sharpening an axe is that you start to fall in love with the sharpening. The blade becomes mirror-bright, a work of art. You develop opinions about whetstones, angles, and grades of steel. You join forums where people post photos of their edges magnified a thousand times. You become an expert in everything except cutting down trees.

Six seconds, though. Six seconds is just enough time to make sure you won't hurt yourself. Six seconds is spit on your palms and a few quick strokes. Six seconds is the admission that the tree doesn't care about your perfect edge—it cares about the first strike and the second and your willingness to keep swinging even when your form is ugly and your hands are blistering.

The mask of perfection fell from the face of stagnation. That's what I see now, in the clarity that comes with distance—how we wear these careful facades, polished and gleaming, while underneath everything has gone still as standing water.

The mask whispers its promises: wait until you're ready, until you cannot fail, until the performance will be flawless. But beneath it, time passes like water through cupped hands. Dreams grow moss. Skills we meant to develop become stories we tell ourselves about someday.

Most of us would rather die than admit to wearing a mask.

So, we build bridges instead. Beautiful, elaborate bridges made of preparation and planning and credentialing and perfecting. We convince ourselves we're being professional and thorough. We're not procrastinating—we're ensuring quality. We're not afraid—we're strategic.

But bridges take time. And while we're building them, carefully placing each plank, the people who just jumped in the water are already on the other side. They're damp and muddy, and their form is terrible, but they're there. Learning from actual contact with actual reality.

The newsletter I never started because I was waiting for the perfect platform. The SaaS idea I researched to death instead of building a horrible first version. The connection I didn't reach out to because my LinkedIn profile wasn't "ready" yet. Each one a tree left standing while I lovingly maintained my axe.

There's a particular exhaustion that comes from this kind of non-doing. It's not the clean tiredness of physical effort or even mental strain. It's the bone-deep depletion of maintaining potential energy without ever converting it to kinetic. Of being a compressed spring that never releases.

I see it in the successful people around me—maybe you recognize it, too. The senior engineers won't speak at conferences until they feel "expert enough." The directors won't pursue that C-suite role until they've checked every possible box. The talented writers edit their first blog post for the seventeenth time. All while telling everyone that it is their dream.

We're so ambitious we've paralyzed ourselves with standards.

The magic forums were wrong. The sensei was wrong. Not about practice—practice matters. But about isolation, about perfection as a prerequisite. The best magicians I know learned by bombing in front of drunk people at bars. The best martial artists were thrown around like rag dolls until their bodies learned what words couldn't teach.

And Lincoln? If he really had eight hours to chop down a tree, I bet he'd test the axe with a few swings, see how the wood responded, and then adjust. Because trees aren't theoretical. They have grain and knots and moisture content that no amount of axe-sharpening can predict.

Six seconds. Just enough time to check you're not holding the wrong end.

Then swing.

The dust motes are settling now, the morning getting on with its business. Somewhere, someone is polishing a business plan. Someone else is designing a logo for a company that doesn't exist yet. Someone is practicing a presentation for a conference they haven't applied to speak at.

And somewhere else, someone just published their terrible first blog post. Someone just sent that imperfect pitch. Someone just stepped onto the mat with a partner for the first time, knowing they're about to embarrass themselves.

Those people understand something the rest of us forget: trees don't care about your axe. They care about your first swing. And your second one. And your willingness to keep going even when the chips fly crooked, and your aim is off, and everyone can see you're still learning how to hold the handle.

The work that will matter most—the thing that will actually change your life—is probably smaller than you think and messier than you'd like and waiting for you to stop sharpening and start swinging.

Six seconds. That's all the permission you need.

The afternoon light is different now, cleaner somehow. Less forgiving. It shows all the scratches on my desk, all the unfinished projects. But also the space where new things might grow if I let them be imperfect; if I let them be seen before they're ready.

If I stop sharpening and start swinging.

The tree is waiting. It always has been. What... about... yours?