“Observations from the Woodpile”

Jeff Yocum

Prologue

Observations from the Woodpile” is a collection of essays bundled together and given as a birthday present for my wife, Nancy, in 1997. Twenty-seven years have passed since the collection was given. The two main subjects of the essays, my sons Justus and Jacob, have grown into men with families of their own.

Work Smart, Not Hard

I don’t know of any other animal that works harder at making work easier than humans. We’ll embark on a most ambitious endeavor and immediately set out to figure out how to do it more easily. I once heard a comedian joke about taking an elevator to a health club on the twenty-fifth floor of some New York high rise only to spend the next half hour on the stair climber machine. I think it’s something deep in our genetic code.

Throughout the woodcutting season, the boys are always coming up with ways to make the job a little easier. I try to encourage that sort of thinking. “Work smarter, not harder,” I tell them. The best engineers, inventors, and entrepreneurs all possessed this quality. As these suggestions [from the boys] come to me, it’s up to me to decide if they’re worth attempting or not before I let them try them out. Sometimes, they come to me with ideas to cut corners like: “If we cut the pieces shorter, they’d be easier to split,” or “If we cut the pieces longer, we wouldn’t have to split as many.” There’s a reason for the wood being a certain length. Too many short pieces make it hard to stack. Too long and they don’t fit the stove.

It seems the world is full of people who don’t know the difference between doing something a better way and just taking a shortcut. Here’s what I tell my boys: If it achieves the same desired product with the same quality, then it’s a better way. If not, well, it’s just a shortcut. There are way too many shortcuts in life already.