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Your brilliance gets dull with use. Just like a knife. Or better yet a saw.
I grew up in a part of the world where a good number of
people earned their livelihood by harvesting the trees that became paper. (Our
field trips weren't to the museum, but to the pulp and paper mill.)
There was something one learned quickly. You couldn't fire up your chainsaw in the
morning and cut all day without the saw losing its 'edge', becoming dull, and
making it more work to use.
Workers who took the time to 'sharpen their saw' could
actually cut more wood than those who don't.
I'm not the first to use this metaphor. The late Stephen
Covey described it as:
"Sharpen
the Saw means preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have - you. It
means having a balanced program for self-renewal in the four areas of your
life: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual."
For those of us in IT leadership, let me add a fifth -
Leading IT.
