A Mason's Work

TRANSCRIPT: 2026-03-01 21-31-31.wav
DATE: 2026-03-02
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[00:00] So there's this saying, and you've probably heard it attributed to like Abraham Lincoln,
[00:06] that when he said, if I had six hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first four sharpening
[00:12] the ax.
[00:13] Here's the thing.
[00:14] Lincoln probably never said it.
[00:17] People that have investigated that quote have traced back to 1944, a speech by a reverend
[00:23] who before that, it came from some unnamed lumberjack.
[00:28] I picked up Lincoln's name somewhere along the way, because the things that we do, we
[00:33] like our wisdom to come from these, you know, impressive sources.
[00:38] But the fact that Lincoln didn't say it doesn't make it wrong.
[00:40] And I think there's something really instructive in maybe that misattribution itself.
[00:46] We repeat this idea because it resonates because most of us had this experience of kind of hacking
[00:52] away at something with a dull blade and wondering why it's not moving.
[00:54] The wisdom is real, even though the source is maybe dubious.
[01:00] So when we talk about preparation, talk about the preparing room.
[01:06] And yesterday we had led into the little conversation about creating space and the mindset as being
[01:12] a part of that.
[01:13] Now let's talk about the physical space.
[01:15] In the lodge, the preparing room is a literal space.
[01:18] It's a place that exists before entering the lodge where the candidate is divested of all
[01:25] of the sort of trappings of the outside world, stripped of the things that would prevent him
[01:28] from being fully engaged in the moment.
[01:32] It's not a waiting room.
[01:33] It's not a lobby.
[01:34] It's not this place like a holding area, right?
[01:39] It's a process.
[01:41] It's a step in a process.
[01:43] It's preparation.
[01:44] It's the preparing room.
[01:46] You need one in your life.
[01:49] It may not necessarily be a room, mind you, but a practice, a part of that process.
[01:54] When we talk about that, again, that process focus over outcomes, you need a preparing process,
[01:59] something that functions as a threshold between your different sort of functions and the world
[02:05] outside.
[02:07] For me, it's cleaning my desk.
[02:09] My desk.
[02:11] When I clean my desk, it gets a bunch of kind of headspace, head trash out of the way.
[02:17] The objects that take up the literal space kind of move out of my way.
[02:21] It frees up my mind and my headspace for just doing the work.
[02:26] For that cleaning the desk, it takes a lot of the kind of annoying things that my mind
[02:34] would tend to fix it on when I'm looking around the room, takes away some of the stuff that
[02:39] just chews up my extra cycles.
[02:41] But here's where something like that gets challenging, right?
[02:46] Cleaning my desk, for example.
[02:49] It gets complicated when you start doing things that are productively unproductive.
[02:54] And that's a kind of a phrase that maybe you've not heard before, but it's doing good
[02:59] things, but for the wrong reasons, for lack of a better way to say it.
[03:05] It's doing this stuff that's going to actually keep you from getting the work done.
[03:10] I can clean the desk for a whole day when, in fact, the work that I might be trying to
[03:15] do would take much, much shorter period of time.
[03:18] And I'm avoiding that work.
[03:20] So be mindful as you develop and cultivate your own process, what that really looks like
[03:25] for you and keep an eye out for that productively unproductive stuff that you might get stuck
[03:30] doing.
[03:32] The other thing that you want to do as you start creating your own process of preparing,
[03:36] creating that threshold experience is understand that those, that preparing process is something
[03:43] that can only be done by you.
[03:45] You have to do it in a way that is right for you.
[03:49] It has to be your process.
[03:51] So you may not find that cleaning your desk solves your kind of, uh, sets your, your,
[03:56] your mind at ease or your, your heart in the right space to do the work for you.
[04:00] Cleaning your desk might be a non-issue may always keep it clean.
[04:03] And that's okay to work on identifying what those threshold experiences that you can create
[04:08] are to help you prepare to go to do the work, to create that space, to get the work done.
[04:15] Uh, and if you find it yourself, you're paying more time and effort and energy to the work
[04:23] of preparing than to doing the work itself, then maybe it's time to change your preparation
[04:28] ritual as it were.
[04:30] You're not here to necessarily judge these things.
[04:32] You just want to evaluate whether or not they're helping you achieve your objectives or not.
[04:36] Um, today's challenge for you, as you go back, uh, as you're done with this podcast is to,
[04:42] to note the times that you have, uh, spent in preparation and see how that is impacted the
[04:49] work itself.
[04:50] Uh, try and pay attention to it.
[04:52] You might find that you're sometimes being productively unproductive, like I tend to be,
[04:56] uh, or you may find that the transitionary periods that you go from place to place, those
[05:02] context, which is those, those opportunities where you change from one task to the next
[05:07] take much longer than they should.
[05:09] And a preparation ritual might help you create the head space and the heart space and the
[05:14] physical space to actually get the work done.