Ecclesiastes 10:10 · World English Bible
Ecclesiastes 10:10 Meaning If the Ax Is Blunt
If the ax is blunt, and one doesn’t sharpen the edge, then he must use more strength; but skill brings success.
What does Ecclesiastes 10:10 mean?
Anyone can supply more force; the rare move is fixing the belief that made the force necessary. What a person assumes about a job sets the state they carry into it, the state sets the emotion, the emotion drives how they move, and years of moving that way compound into a destiny of long hours and thin returns.
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Ecclesiastes 10:10 through 1 lens
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Anyone can supply more force; the rare move is fixing the belief that made the force necessary.
What a person assumes about a job sets the state they carry into it, the state sets the emotion, the emotion drives how they move, and years of moving that way compound into a destiny of long hours and thin returns. Grinding harder intervenes at the last link, the point of least leverage.
Skill is the intervention made further up, on the assumption itself. A person who examines what they have decided about the work and about their own capacity changes the state they operate from, and the same hours begin returning something different. Skipping that rarely produces outright failure; it produces decades of honest effort worth a fraction of what it cost.
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Live Ecclesiastes 10:10 today
- Find the thing you do every week that you just push through, and spend fifteen minutes learning a better way instead of doing it one more time the hard way. A shortcut, a template, a setting, a question you never asked.
- Ask one person who is good at something you struggle with how they actually do it. Most people will show you in five minutes what you have been grinding at for months.
- In the middle of a long week, when your answer to everything is to work later, stop and ask what you have decided about this job that makes more hours the only option you can see.
Where am I pushing harder instead of asking what I have assumed?
The same truth in other traditions
Tao Te Ching 63
Handle the thing while it is small and simple. Force applied late is force wasted on what a little understanding would have solved.
Zhuangzi · the butcher
A master butcher's blade stays sharp for years because he finds the openings in the joint instead of hacking through bone. Skill replaces strain.
Stoicism · Epictetus
It is not the work that exhausts us but our judgment about it. Examine the judgment and the same labor becomes a different thing.
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