Sharpen Your Saw

This is the last medicine prescribed by Stephen Covey in his book 'The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People'. In his book, he explains seven different habits which can make you increase your efficiency & achievements significantly. The last one - Sharpen Your Saw - is the most underrated one. Normally we think that we have achieved so much and so know much about the business. We tend to not listen to others or do not want to absorb new things. We are very much comfortable with our knowledge. 

There is very good example given in the book. One man joins a company of wood cutters and is given responsibility of cutting trees. On Day 1, he cut 10 trees. On Day 3, he could cut only 9 trees and after a week, he could cut only 7 trees. His supervisor is worried and warns him that if he does not give good results, he could be fired. The man explains his supervisor that it is not that he is doing anything less. He is working as hard as on Day 1, he is also not doing any time pass activities. The supervisor watches him the next day and after seeing the results advises him to sharpen the saw. He observes that the intensity of the worker is okay, but he has not sharpened his saw from Day 1. In result, though he is working as hard as earlier, the axe was not good enough to cut the same number of trees.

The technology today is changing faster than earlier. Today is information age and in this age, it is difficult to remain at your best without technology. Technology is the thing with which you can leverage yourself and become the best. But for this, we need to forbid our ignorance of the technology and brace it. Not just technology, we need to be update in our area of working. We need to read different types of books so that we can come across different ideas written by different people. You may remember the story of 6 blind men who were asked to describe an elephant. Each of them described differently, one said that elephant is like rope, other said it is like wall while the other one said it is like trunk of a tree. All were right, but no description was complete. Similarly, we need to respect and read the views of other writers and take whatever is applicable to our lives and profession.