Early in my career I was a professional fact-checker. As a copy editor for the Albany Times-Union, part of my job was to read the articles and make sure that what we were printing was accurate. When you see an error or a typo in a news article, it’s a breakdown in quality control. The copy editors missed something.
In some ways the experience has served me well because when I make a presentation to my management or a client, I am careful in my review to clean up mistakes. In other ways this background is a curse because when someone gives me something to read, I start proofing, not reading. I often have returned material to its author saying, “Until you clean this up, I can’t read the content. All I see are typos.”
One of my bugaboos are quotes. If I am going to use a quote from a famous person, I have to make sure that they actually said it. Insanity is incorrectly attributing the same quote to Einstein over and over and expecting it to be true.
So I read with interest an article on LinkedIn that used a quote from Abe Lincoln: “If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I would spend four hours sharpening my ax.” The quote is obviously meant to emphasize that Lincoln would spend more time preparing for the task than actually executing the task. Good advice! Except that something about that quote did not sit right with me. Maybe it’s because six hours is a really long time to cut down a tree. And four hours is a really long time to sharpen an ax!
I checked and this was one of many variations of the quote attributed to Lincoln. Another has him saying if he had eight hours, he’d sharpen the ax for six. Based on my own experience, it should take about 10 minutes to drop a tree. According to the website, Quote Investigator, the original quote is from an anonymous woodsman in a 1956 article who was asked what he would do if he had five minutes to cut down a tree. He replied, “I would use the first two and a half minutes sharpening my ax.” A far cry from the four or six hours others have attributed to our 16th president!
The point is this: the details matter. When we are trying to influence another person, whether in sales or in leading a team, our credibility is the foundation on which we build trust. When the other party starts to question the accuracy of our assertions (“We are the only company in this industry that has ever done a project this size…”) we raise a red flag and risk losing the deal.
Credit my fastidious fact-checking to my journalism professor, Zay Smith. In my first class at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, he shared a saying that emphasizes the importance of confirming statements from sources, never trusting them on face value: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
These posts are terrific, John. I recall some of them from LinkedIn. Strong content presented with a light touch. Looking forward to more.