Did you ever agonize over a simple decision? Whether to get full-fat milk or skimmed. You’re standing there with both in your hand and a precious five minutes pass when you could have just put one into your basket and moved on. Two milk cartons were staring you in the face, but really, it wasn’t which milk to choose that caused the paralysis. You were thinking about something bigger. A promotion or changing jobs, maybe you’re planning on buying a new car. You’ve done the research, tons of it in fact. Sixteen different articles, countless reviews. There’s a pros and cons list written down somewhere. All that, however, seems to have led you to a place where you are more stuck than ever.

When your mind is full, whether that’s because of lots of tiny problems or a couple of chunky ones, it’s because of clutter. Your desk at work or home can have the same problem. It’s incredibly difficult to find the pen or exact tool you are looking for when they’re disorganised and messy. Mental clarity is the same as this physical mess. If things aren’t right, then the simplest detail can derail you.

Close your eyes for a moment and consider this: do you have a clear space where you can think or a mental junk drawer where you can’t find anything?

Why The "Obvious" Advice Gets Skipped

Most people will nod along when they read this rule. They’ll smile when someone tells them to tidy their desk and then not do it. To support decision making they’ll immediately use the habit of drowning the decision in research and opinion. Of course they do. Doing research feels like progress. You can inform decisions by doing research. It’s definitely not procrastination. Clearing up your desk doesn’t help you find something specific on it, does it? Read that again. If what you are looking for is on the desk, it does. But if it’s not there, then you’ve got to look elsewhere. With a clear desk you’d have known right away.

Likewise, sitting still and asking "what am I actually trying to solve here?" might feel like doing nothing but it will actually help you more than you know. Sitting still is the start of clearing your mental workspace.

I know your instinct will be to resist this advice. Research is important. It helps the decision! But therein lies the rub. More information does not bring more clarity. It’s the equivalent of piling stuff onto your desk. I’ll also admit, I tidied my desk less than a month ago and the clutter built up again. I know my favourite Uniball pen is right in front of me but I can’t see it without searching for it. I know something is there. There’s no decision to be made, but it still takes me vital time to search for the pen. So consider, how bad will it be if you have to decide something as well?

Information without clarity is noise

Why We Get This Backwards

How to Build Clarity And Decide

Clarity Usually Requires Less Information, Not More.

 Every Friday morning at 8am we had an ongoing project implementation call with a client in Germany. It was an extended trial of our SaaS offering but we were on the path to conversion into production use. Each week, small niggles would be raised. We’d commit to them in our roadmap or else fix them or show the client how to resolve the problem on the call. Things were going great. This was one of a number of concurrent clients who actively trialling the product. We had a lot of early traction. The purpose built solution was very different to what everyone else was selling and was built with feedback from expert users. We had a spreadsheet built with every competitor in the space. "I think we're actually ahead," I said, scrolling through it. We were untouchable. That is, until the Friday morning when the client project manager joined the Zoom meeting alone and with a smile said “It’s not you, it’s us.”

They weren’t the only prospect that we lost out to either. Eight months later, two of our "behind" competitors were eating our market share like it was their breakfast. Their tech wasn’t better. In fact, it was a rehash of what had already been on the market for years at that point. Their sales guys weren’t secretly more advanced. When we said yes and meant it, they said yes but it was really a maybe. We had become complacent. We'd stopped updating the spreadsheet as soon as it told us what we wanted to hear.

This is the trap that "always overestimate your competition" is built to catch.

The Comfort Problem

Build It Into Your Operating Strategy

It’s Not Really About Your Competition At All

Don't Let the Spreadsheet Lie to You

In one of my previous jobs I had a team member who was meticulous. Think “a fully colour coded planner for the day before most people got into the office” and you’re on the right track. At one point, just so I could compare, I gave them and one of their teammates an even number of simple tasks each. By the time my meticulous associate finished building the really very important spreadsheet to track progress, the other had three tasks already crossed off the scrap of paper they had written them down on.

Neither of them were lazy. All of the tasks got done before their deadline and the results were up to scratch. Both were sharp (I don't suffer fools on my team) but I did note two very different relationships with complexity, and this gave one of my team a significant headstart. Six months later they were doing a different job while beautifully color-coded spreadsheets were still the order of the day for the other.

We've all been there in some form. You're facing a problem, and instinct tells you the solution needs to match the magnitude of the problem. Big challenge, big system. Important goal, elaborate plan. We look for the best framework, find an app or service that will help us, write up a business justification, trial three different suppliers and drop a chunk of change on a multi-year contract. Then we move on to drafting multi-step processes to account for it all. The complexity is a clear sign of seriousness. Except it rarely is. Usually all of this effort is because we don’t want to get on with the work.

Simplicity Has a Bad Reputation

When something looks simple we equate it with easy. "Simple" is a synonym for "basic" or "unsophisticated." It’s not going to win any prizes. Complexity means intelligence, right? Let’s leave simplicity for the thickos. A 40-tab strategy document and a polished executive summary feel better than a single clear problem statement. Even when that statement is the thing people remember. The one they will act on.

Staying honest, let’s admit that most of the time the elaborate system isn't rigor. It's plain old avoidance. All the effort we pour into frameworks and processes is often just a way of postponing the actual work. 

Simplicity is not the absence of thought. It is the result of it. You can make something complicated without any effort; it just requires adding things. Think about your colleague who insists on bringing ideas to a committee. Building a project charter. Adding in irrelevant processes because it looks impressive. Maybe I didn’t describe your colleague there, maybe I just described you. Making something simple requires a deeper understanding of the problem at hand. You need to know it well enough to know which bits you can remove. The design world has a phrase for this. It was borrowed from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: 

Perfection is achieved not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away.

Complexity doesn’t just mean more hoops to jump through at the beginning though, there’s a hidden cost that waits until later to sneak up on you: maintenance. A complicated system goes beyond just hard to build. It rewards your blood, sweat and tears by being hard to sustain too. It’ll break more easily, be more confusing when the next person attempts to use it, and it will drain your energy every single time you have to improve it, modify it or sort it out.

Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast

There's a phrase that originated in military circles that captures this idea perfectly: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Almost a contradiction in terms. How can slow ever be fast?

Things become clearer once you've watched someone rush. Rushing introduces errors, and they require correction, often taking more time to correct than doing it right in the first place. Put another way, more haste equals less speed. I am a firm believer that “move fast and break things” has an awful lot to answer for in this regard. Speed achieved through haste is a short-term gain that almost always creates long-term pain.

Being deliberate, in control, doing only the simple things necessary to get the job done, that's the slow part. When the slow part is smooth it means fewer errors and less rework, which is exactly what lets you move fast.

Imagine a seasoned operator shooting at targets versus the nervous novice fumbling at every step. The simple deliberate habits, repeated consistently, lead to flawless execution. A complicated and chaotic habit, abandoned after eight days because it required too much upkeep, doesn’t go anywhere near the bullseye. Simplicity, therefore, is the thing that lets you move without friction.

Where This Shows Up in Daily Life

In personal productivity, a single prioritized list will beat a project management suite you don’t know how to use. You put one task in front of the other instead of trying to figure out how in the hell to create a dependent task in MS Project.

In business strategy, a short and sharp tagline ("we help X customers do Y better") beats a mission statement with four embedded clauses. 

In product design, the feature that just makes sense beats the one that requires a tutorial or training session.

The pattern is there because the underlying mechanisms are all the same. Complexity throws up blockers. Simplicity just lets you plug away and finish once you continue to show up.

Deliberately Choose Simple

Ok, so earlier I gave off about people introducing frameworks where they were not needed. But what do you do when you don’t know how to simplify? Simplicity isn't a default state you fall into; in a world full of tools, templates, and "best practices," it's a discipline you have to actively choose. So ironically, here's a little framework to help with that. Trust me, it’s simple to follow.

Strip it back. Ask what this thing is actually supposed to do. Remove anything that is nice-to-have and doesn’t achieve what it is supposed to. No extras! Aim for the core function only.

Test with the tired version of yourself. Will this still work on a low-energy Tuesday, not just on the motivated Monday when you designed it? Simple systems survive bad days. Complicated ones don't.

Let repetition prove the need for more. When the simple version has been tested and has been found lacking, only then add something. And only add one thing at a time!

Finally, protect the smoothness, that’s where the fast comes from. If things are not going fast enough, ask yourself whether the process is smooth. Where are the friction points? Where is the thing not sturdy enough, not easy enough or is inconsistent. Inherent smoothness of a design is what produces and maintains real speed over time.

Simple Is Not Easy

Expect this to be difficult. Tiring. Almost worth giving up on and building a gantt chart that can go to a weekly advisory board for approval. You need to be prepared for the hard truth that simplicity will require more skill and patience than complexity does. A chef can hide mediocrity behind ten ingredients and three sauces. A simple dish, four ingredients and a pan sauce, will expose weakness immediately. A simple explanation requires you to actually understand the subject at hand. The complicated approach gets by on jargon. It papers over the gaps in your own knowledge for longer than anyone will admit.

So the instinct to add complexity isn't usually a sign of rigor. Sometimes it’s a sign you haven't fully figured it out yet. Resist the urge to hide behind complexity.

Simple Will Ask More Of You

Simple is solid, not because it asks less of you, but because it asks you to give more: clarity, restraint, and the discipline to keep removing what doesn't serve the core need. Take slow is smooth and smooth is fast, not as a clever paradox or line from an F1 movie but as a description of how friction actually works. Every needless layer you build into a system, a habit, or a plan is friction you'll pay for later.

The next time you're tempted to make something more sophisticated to prove you're taking it seriously, pause. Ask whether you're adding value or something else.

What's one place in your life right now where a simpler approach might actually outperform the complicated one you've been building? I'd like to hear it in the comments.

You cannot expect what you don't inspect. This is a quote often attributed to W. Edwards Deming, known as the father of the quality movement and lean manufacturing. Over the years I’ve often taken principles I’ve learned from working and applied them to my personal life. Like attempting to always arrive with common sense. Because not many people do. And then applying that common sense vigorously to the situation. Sometimes this still has to be at the conscious level because a problem is difficult to figure out, other times I would like to think that I just automatically apply these things. Deming is often quoted too as saying that you can’t inspect quality into things. I really like that because in my experience, that’s the very thing that a lot of auditors do and it’s also why people tend to dread audits. If you are looking to solve a problem or fix something, however, taking a closer look and considering it may just be exactly what you need.

The Closer You Look, the More There Is to Fix

This is not one of those posts where I wax lyrical about a small business who finally figured out why people were abandoning their carts. They caught an error that had been happening silently blah blah blah. Let’s not. Let’s go a bit simpler. I’ll tell you about a problem that I haven’t solved yet, even though I know the solution to it. A problem that I have consciously decided not to do anything about. Because when you see too much detail it can become overwhelming and a problem can suddenly become impossible looking. The mole hill becomes a mountain.

My car always looks dirty. Sure, there’s road grime that builds up. Brake dust coats the wheels. The rain dumps fine sand particles from the Sahara onto it from time to time. When I was a young man, I would watch my Dad get a bucket of water, a household sponge and some washing up liquid and wash his car. Three terrible ideas mixed into one. A single bucket means you’re “washing” with dirty water after a while, a household sponge is too coarse, and washing up liquid can damage paint. When I first started driving, I did the same. I quickly learned that is a great way to introduce swirls into the paintwork and ultimately damage your car over time. The alternative? Go full on detailer, foam cannon contactless washes, polish applications, spend more time on making a car look good for a couple of hours than you would tackling bigger problems in your life.

Surface Detail Lies to Us

Once You Start Looking, You Will See It Everywhere.

How To Look Closer Without Burning Out

The Piece You May Be Missing

Fast Is Built on Detail

There's a piece of financial advice that gets repeated so often that it may as well have lost its meaning: diversify your portfolio. In other words, don't put all your eggs in one basket. And yet, there is one investment the majority of people never think to make, even those in the financial world, one that compounds more reliably than almost anything else available to them. The investment in themselves.

Who Believes in You?

Here is something most motivational content skips over, because it's not particularly comfortable to say. There will be stretches of your life, sometimes long ones, when nobody is lining up to invest in you. No mentor is seeking you out. No employer is fast-tracking your development. No institution is handing you a scholarship. No investor is backing your idea. No one is pulling you aside to say, "I see something in you."

The people that are there for you now, may not always be there. Opportunities pass. People change. Things happen.

One Friday afternoon in either late 2018 or early 2019 I was sitting at my desk, finishing up a few things, looking forward to the weekend. It was a bright day. I recall the sun shining through the window, a warming feeling even though the weather would have been cold for that time of year. My phone rang. The first line that came out of the small speaker by my ear, the reply to my greeting, caused my stomach to drop. Across the other side of the world, my manager and mentor had been let go. I got on incredibly well with him. He was knowledgeable, patient and invested in his staff. Was there for us. With that one sentence, that was now gone. I don’t know if he knew that it was coming or not but he had gone to work that morning, likely looking to round out the week. I’d hope they let him collect his things but maybe he never even made it past the front door. In the grand scheme of things, maybe not a biggie. Nobody died. Life went on. He found success elsewhere in time. But it goes to show, things change and not always how you would expect.

You might say that this is simply the nature of the world. Attention and resources follow existing signals of success, accumulating around people who are already compounding, people who have already made an investment in themselves.

If you are at the beginning, or starting over, operating without a network or coming from a background that didn't hand you connections and credentials, you need to be your own first investor. You may be your only investor for a while. Even more worryingly, if you’ve been written off by your peers, perhaps made a mistake that they are not willing to forget you’ll be travelling a redemption arc while being that solo investor. Grim, isn’t it?

However! However, this tragedy is actually an opportunity in disguise. One that most people miss because they're too busy waiting for someone else to go first. For someone to hand something to them. For Lady Luck to shine on them. Luck is not arbitrary. You have to place yourself in a position to be able to receive it.

What It Means to Invest in Yourself

It Compounds. All Of It.

When Nobody Else Will

In any given month in the year I can look out my window and there’s a good chance that it will be raining. Some days it feels like it’s been raining for months on end. This is the price we pay for living in a country so lush and green.I’ll sit there and think, “I could be doing something in the garden right now” or maybe I’ll have a short day dream about a little project I could take care of. As someone who sits behind a desk for a living, I catch myself doing this and know exactly what it means. Ask anyone in the trades what they do when it’s raining and they’ll tell you that they get on with it, because they have to and because it’s just a part of the job. And ultimately, this isn’t about being soft or a wizened, gnarled, burly worker who doesn’t care what nature throws at them. This is about whether or not you wait for motivation to strike or whether you have the discipline to start something. This isn’t about the weather, is it? It’s about action, not a line about meteorology.

Stop Waiting for Perfect Conditions. Most Success Happens in the Rain.

Maybe you have a great idea, a side project or a career change you've been turning over in your mind for months. You're almost ready. You're just waiting for the right time. For things to settle down at work. For the kids to be a bit older, better able to look after themselves. For the economy to stabilise. For the stars to align.

While you're waiting though, someone else ships the product, takes the job, starts the company. The one you were going to. They didn't have it any better than you. They probably didn’t even have the same resources or knowledge as you do. They just decided that good enough conditions were sufficient and went for it. They showed an indifference to getting wet. An impatience for perfection to manifest. A moment where they said “F*** this noise” and did it anyway.

There's a name for what stops you from doing the same. Call it “precondition thinking.” The belief that something has to be solved or just right or true before something else can begin. It feels like it’s the work itself. It's not. 

I understand the impulse to wait for things to be favourable. Chasing the perfect moment can be like getting the perfect bite of food. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does… However, when it comes to perfection, you will tell yourself little lies. These lies masquerade as diligence, preparation, professionalism. You're not ready yet. You're doing more research. Waiting until you have more confidence, more money, more time, more clarity. The details need to be sorted before the bigger stuff can come together.

This precondition thinking attempts to get everything right before you do something. You’re identifying requirements. Constraints have to be considered. You need to understand the bare minimum that you need before the problem can really be solved.

Everything that is blocking your progress is a preference that’s pretending to be a requirement.

Waiting for perfection doesn't just delay success. It actually degrades your capacity to succeed when conditions do improve. If you had shipped in the rain, clumsily, with a substandard setup, you’d have ten months of real experience. What do you get from waiting, ten months of readiness?

The frustrating thing is that the more you do this, the more you feel like you’re making headway. You’re building in stealth. Once this thing gets to market, once the project is started, it’s going to be amazing. This process, however, is really you attaching action to something that will never arrive. It’s a waste of time. Procrastination in disguise. Every week you wait, or every new risk you try to mitigate, the imagined optimal moment becomes further away. It’s like saying “I was going to…” in response to your parents asking why your room wasn’t tidied. It’s not much use to you, or them, and the room still isn’t tidy.

To be fair, sometimes you do need dry weather. There are genuinely weather-dependent tasks. Pouring concrete in a downpour is counterproductive for one thing. But truly figuring out whether a task needs dry weather or not requires you to stop, take a step back and assess the lies, half-truths and truths you have told yourself. Most of these are part of the first two categories and not the last.

The Two Categories of Work

Simplifying everything into a binary dry weather vs who cares is an oversimplification. Generally things exist on a spectrum rather than one or the other. But you’re trying to get things done. So bear with me. If you want to get moving and take action you have to make it that simple. Either you start or you don’t. Not, you’ve started but you’re really just pretending.

You can use the 80/20 rule as verification. If you have 10 tasks and more than 2 of them require dry weather, you’re either actually pouring concrete or you’re convincing yourself the task is harder than it actually is.

Perhaps, even, it’s not the work that is actually holding you back. Maybe it’s just getting started. There’s a lovely phrase in Irish that goes “Tús maith, leath na hoibre.” It means “a good start is half the work.” I think this ageless piece of wisdom talks to the inertia of starting a task. The first five minutes. The getting up off the couch bit. Once you’re past that initial hump, you will often find that the motion required to overcome the inertia keeps you going for longer than you expected.

20% - Work That Genuinely Requires Dry Weather

Dry weather work may be less than 20% but is highly unlikely to be more than that. These are tasks with hard technical dependencies. A sterile environment, regulations to adhere to, safety measures, specific legal filings that come with stringent deadlines etc

If you proceed with this work without addressing these dependencies, the outcome will be objectively worse or even downright dangerous. Not uncomfortable or awkward or harder. Materially lesser.

80% - Work That Just Requires Getting A Bit Wet

Almost everything else the weather is aside from the point. Writing, selling, building, designing, managing, teaching, creating. The quality of your outputs in these tasks are not set by conditions. They’re held back by a lack of sustained effort and iteration. The false desire for perfection before starting gives you an excuse to not put in effort or put in the wrong effort. From there it doesn’t matter if you iterate. Working on the wrong thing brings you further away from your goal instead of closer to it. So, pick the right thing, even if you suck at it. Try get a little less sucky at it over time, until eventually you aren’t.

Your first draft written down is better than the draft never written. A sales call made when you're not feeling 100% can still close a deal. Even if it doesn’t close the deal, it can progress it. And if that deal was going to be lost, trust me, waiting or ignoring it would have lost the deal for you anyway. Even a business launched in a difficult economic climate can still find its footing. History is crammed with evidence to support this assertion. JK Rowling drafted Harry Potter as a single mother on benefits. Disney survived a war, a studio split, and a near-bankruptcy before it made Cinderella. It wasn’t a little bit of rain hindering these examples, was it? The work got done anyway.

There are some easy steps to get started and begin to make progress.

Without knowing how big your task is, setting a completion date will not help you. It might just discourage you. Set a start date. Tomorrow is good, today is better. The start date is when you will start regardless of anything else. Ask someone you know to hold you accountable. If you don’t know anyone, set a calendar reminder.

Start with one small step. Make one call, write one page, send one email.

If you’re still struggling you spend one hour defining the problem. Some requirements are real. The rest are not. Know the difference. If, at the end of the hour, you don’t have a solid grasp on the topic, put it aside and come back to it the next day. Your subconscious will work on the problem for you overnight.

When you still need to be convinced… write down the condition(s) you think you need. If this perfect state never arrived, would it make the work impossible or just uncomfortable? Answer this honestly. If you’re afraid of a bit of discomfort then abandon the idea entirely. Close your browser and don’t finish this article. It isn’t for you.

The Waiting Game Will Kill Things

Waiting is not a neutral act. It feels passive, but it has an active cost. Forget your imagined competitor building their skills - that is another excuse. Forget the shifting market. Without being on the market you cannot possibly know it. The gap between "now" and "later" is not empty. 

The biggest thing you are breeding by waiting is a psychological toll. Chronic waiting builds anxiety instead of readiness. It’s the Sunday night dread. The feeling that nothing will work, everything is wrong and incomplete is the best your project will ever be. The longer the gap, the heavier the imagined task becomes.

Skill, confidence, and momentum are all built through action. Some say perfect practice makes perfect. Maybe, maybe not. You and I both know that any practice with good intention and a little help from time to time will get you to good. Perfect isn’t where you are going nor where you need to be. Strive for perfection and you’ll convince yourself to give up before you've started.

Indifference to getting wet is not indifference to quality. It is the understanding that quality emerges from iteration, and to iterate you first need to start.

So Pick Up Your Tools

I’m willing to bet you always think that you are working harder than everyone else. Think back to the last group project you worked on, whether it was at the office, in a classroom, or even planning a family event. Remember the little devil sitting on your shoulder that whispered “Hey, you’re doing most of the work here!" To vent your frustration you might have even said it out loud afterward, half-joking but meaning every word. From there, your course of action really depends on which wolf you feed. Take a step back for a moment and consider, were you actually doing more? Or did it just feel that way?

Even the best of us have blind spots and this is one of them. You remember the effort you put in more than that of others. You're not an arrogant or unkind person, this is just how memory and perception work. Taking a moment to reflect and appreciate the effort of others once in a while will help you feed the right wolf. 

Be thankful. This sounds simple, maybe even obvious, but this one small thing can alter your perception of your relationships with others, and even yourself.

Are you the Actor or the Observer?

Break the Pattern!

This Is Not A Social Problem

Small Stones Can Make Huge Waves

I’ve worked with a huge number of people in the last twenty years. More people than I can recall to be honest. There are people I remember who probably don’t remember me and visa versa. Over the years there are a couple of types of people that emerge. The one I want to focus on today is the constant critic. Don’t get me wrong, a healthy dose of constructive criticism is always a good thing. Delivery of a critique and willingness to fix things, however, are two very different things.

My previous job was with a fast growing startup. When I joined there were twelve of us, last count I think they’re around two hundred and fifty or so. Quarterly management reviews were always exciting, even if they were a tough slog. We looked at the big bets we were making and focused on solving problems where they cropped up. After two or three days you would be mentally exhausted but overall they were productive and so, well worthwhile.

One particular meeting stands out in my mind. The business was launching a significant new service. As we went through the presentation people began to shift in their seats. This was a bigger bet than we had made as a group previously. People were naturally a little nervous. Then it happened, the interruption. I won’t go into the details but essentially what followed was about ten minutes of why the plan wouldn’t work. People began to stand, walk to the screen and point. Right down to the detail of what would and wouldn’t fit through a specific door. The failure of the project was a foregone conclusion. This was put forward with total confidence, but there was no solution offered. Not a good way to do business in my book.

When you challenge someone like this, what’s the usual response that you get? Silence. A shrug. Maybe a vague hand waving "I don't know, just... not this."

Criticism without ownership is one of the safest positions a person can take, and it can poison a team under the guise of robust discussion. Once you see it, examples will show up left, right and centre forever more.

Stop Diagnosing Things To Death

Every idea should go through some critical analysis. Just to make sure you’re getting things right and not about to do something monumentally stupid. I’ve written a lot about procrastination and getting stuck and as part of that, sometimes pointing out problems can feel like you’re contributing. 

But there's a way this behaviour is exhibited that isn't about helping. There are various reasons behind why people do this but ultimately if you never propose a solution, you never risk being wrong. You can be "the person who saw it coming" and never risk failure.

Startups, and teams in general, don't often fail from a lack of criticism. Believe you me, they get enough of that from their board and their investors. Failure comes from a lack of progress. A group that has more critics than problem solvers and builders will over time diagnose itself to death. When every idea gets picked apart to the nth degree before it can be tried how can it ever have a chance? Any chance of forward momentum dies before it can be tested in the real world. You know, the place where it might have actually made a difference.

Our Instincts Are Wrong

Spotting the Difference

The Critic’s Litmus Test

Look Within

Think about when you reach for a wrench mid-project and find it caked in old grease, or when you have to unclog that poor lawnmower that’s got three years of old grass caked onto the underside. Neither are broken. Not technically. But you could have taken better care of them. Let’s talk about maintaining your tools. And I don’t mean for a given definition of a "tool." Forget your MacBook, CRM, or your body after a workout.

Now, as with any rule there are exceptions. A rusty hammer will still drive a nail just as well as a shiny one. The swing matters more than the surface. A dull chisel, however, will cause wood to tear out. It crushes the wood fibres instead of cutting them cleanly. This means your work will be less accurate and the tool actually becomes more dangerous to use. That poor lawnmower of yours will still cut your grass but the results are pathetic compared to a well sharpened blade and a sweetly running engine.

I find a certain pleasure in restoring tools. They feel better in your hand, they work better. I even enjoy watching other people doing the same thing via YouTube. When a tool does break from a lack of maintenance, old father time has his hand out. The bill is now due for those years of neglect.

This Is Not A Motivational Poster

This Is Not A New Idea

Little And Often

Don’t Go Overboard

Tools Don't Ask For Much