Sharpen The Saw

Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw

Sharpen the saw is the last of Covey’s 7 habits.  (There actu­ally is an 8^th Habit, but that is another book, and per­haps another post.)  Sharpen the Saw is the habit of per­sonal renewal.  The metaphor of “sharp­en­ing the saw” is sim­ple -  It is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to spend all of your time saw­ing, while neglect­ing to sharpen the saw.   For peo­ple to truly be effec­tive they need to take time out to revi­tal­ize, retool, refresh, and rethink.

Covey describes the 4 areas of life that require sharp­en­ing as being the phys­i­cal, social/emotional, men­tal, and spir­i­tual.  These ele­ments are not iso­lated, but serve to enhance one another.  For exam­ple, excerise clearly offers an indi­vid­ual the oppor­tu­nity to improve phys­i­cal health.  It also builds self-esteem, which nur­tures the emo­tional aspect of a per­son.  It improves cir­cu­la­tion and brain func­tion, thus improv­ing men­tal health.  It also helps to clar­ify deep thoughts, poten­tially nur­tur­ing the spir­i­tual por­tion of a human being.

Habit 7 is about find­ing mean­ing­ful activ­i­ties to engage in for the pur­pose of enrich­ing life.  It requires mak­ing time for these very impor­tant and usu­ally not urgent activ­i­ties that make life worth liv­ing.  Time with fam­ily, or read­ing books, paint­ing, writ­ing, exer­cis­ing, med­i­tat­ing, study­ing, or just tak­ing a walk — that which brings us joy, knowl­edge, peace, and under­stand­ing.   It is these activ­i­ties that ulti­mately make us bet­ter people.

For me recent exper­i­ments wiht run­ning, yoga, and a lit­tle weight train­ing here and there have been extrememly ben­e­fi­cial to my phys­i­cal health and over­all well-being.  I also like to lis­ten to books on tape from time to time which feed my men­tal need for learn­ing.  Cre­at­ing and play­ing music are spir­i­tual activ­i­ties for me.  Doing it with and in front of other peo­ple also make it a social expeience that builds and nur­tures pes­onal rela­tion­ships.  Not to men­tion that hav­ing to write music can be cathar­tic, thus improv­ing my men­tal state.  These are just a few of the activ­i­ties that help me to “sharpen the saw.”

So what does this have to do with social media?

Social media by def­i­n­i­tion is a social func­tion.  Sure you can spend a lot of mind­less time sift­ing through Face­book read­ing silly com­ments, but you can also use social media to truly con­nect and under­stand other peo­ple.  You can engage with peo­ple.  Learn and fol­low their sto­ries, and share your own.   This can very clearly help to sharpen the social part of the saw, but there is more to it than that.

Activ­i­ties like blog­ging or pod­cast­ing require a lot of cre­ativ­ity.  This con­tent is often the fruits of our other “shapen the saw” activ­i­ties.  “You are never going to believe what I did.”  “I just read the best book.”  “Ten things you need to know about writ­ing songs.”  “My Vaca­tion Pic­tures.”  Out of our sharp­en­ing the saw activ­i­ties flow sto­ries.  Out of sto­ries flow con­ver­sa­tion, learn­ing, and hope­fully understanding.

Sharp­en­ing the saw gives us some­thing to share and social media gives us peo­ple and places to share it with.  It is cycli­cal in nature.  This shar­ing of sto­ries feeds our human needs for inter­ac­tion.  Sites like Nike­Plus let us com­bine our phys­i­cal exer­cise with our social, emo­tional, and men­tal needs.  It cre­ates sto­ries.  It enriches life.  Net­flix makes it pos­si­ble to not just rent movies, but to also expe­ri­ence them in the con­text of other peo­ple and their responses to them.  Upload­ing pho­tos or writ­ing out a blog post, or putting a song on itunes, or a video on YouTube can enrich us in so many ways.  Social media is sim­ply an exten­sion of sharp­en­ing the saw, and allows us to learn how to do so with the input of the world.

This can also be viewed in the con­text of explo­ration.  There are so many tools, tech­nolo­gies and plat­forms out there.  Don’t fear them.  Take some time to experiement with some of these plat­forms and have some fun with it.  You may dis­cover that many are not right for you, but then again you might just stum­ble onto your next big cre­ative endeeavor.  Either way, you won’t break the inter­net or injure you­self by learning.

Whether you it as a way to strengthen your men­tal health, your phys­i­cal capac­ity, your spir­i­tual under­standin, your emo­tional well being, or all of the above,  health, social media offers an amaz­ing way for you to keep the saw sharp and make you a more effec­tive human being.