It’s late September, and that means it’s time to order up some firewood and begin stacking it for when the cold weather hits. This weekend, I had my wood delivered, and my father happened to be in town as well. He pitched in and helped me stack up my wood into a corral I had built last year, and we got the job done fairly quickly. It was interesting to watch his approach, as he was reluctant to begin since he had never stacked wood before.
I assured him there was no magic. Simply start, and if you see the pile is starting to get out of level, insert a piece to correct it, turning the log 90 degrees if needed, and keep going. Basically, you have a constant experiment going. There’s no need for aesthetic beauty, just functionality – keep the wood from falling over.
I realized that I was witnessing, first hand, an example of what often keeps us from starting a new task – fear of doing it “wrong,” even though “wrong” hasn’t been defined by anyone else other than ourselves. A lot of the time, we set a standard for success that’s hard to achieve, especially when we’re new to a task and know the result won’t be perfect. That’s when we have to remind ourselves that it’s nearly impossible to do something perfectly the first time we try it – you have to give yourself permission to learn. Having alleviated his fear of screwing up, Dad started tossing logs onto the pile and, when I showed him he was getting out-of level, soon learned to find a good-fitting log and correct the alignment. It wasn’t long before we were working independently and the job started moving along quickly.
It was about this time that I noticed the new neighbor across the street was also stacking wood. He was at the task without benefit of any kind of stand or corral, and the pile was getting a bit lopsided and unsteady. Once again, here was another perfect example of how we tend to work. When the pile started to wobble, he could have stepped back a bit and thought of ways to keep it steady, but like all of us have done – he kept on doing what he was doing just to get it done (and will have more work to do later when it falls over).
It’s both frustrating and amusing how we’re built, and what we convince ourselves of sometimes. We’re certain we need to show activity in order to show that we’re working hard, and we tend to skip over the processes of planning our work upfront to avoid problems, and analyzing our activity to see if the plan is working.
The lessons learned this weekend? Keep it simple. Give yourself permission to fail and time to learn. No one likes doing anything twice.
Copyright © 2011 David Kasprzak
