How to Take Interview Preparation Serious
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
-Abraham Lincoln
This is a quote I learned from my football coach when I was a freshman in high school. I am now a junior in college and still think about this quote daily. Originally, my coach told us this after a very hard day of practice and was trying to show to us that with the five days of practice we had before our game the best way to win the game is to sharpen up (no pun intended) your skills before it happens. So when game time comes you are fully prepared for anything that is thrown at you and you will have practiced that scenario over and over again. I am 20 years old and I use this every time I go into a project at work or an interview with someone that is looking to hire me.
You may be asking what does a quote about sharpening an axe have to do with the job world. Well, this is it.
My experiences with interviewing at a company always boil down to 2 things :
- I am fully prepared to go into this interview (ex – resume, proper knowledge of the company, practice interviews, etc.)
- Executing the interview.
The “four hours of sharpening the axe” is the preparation of what I am going to do at an interview. With this in mind, my first step for preparing for an interview is to look at my resume and see if anything needs updating, if not then I move on to research. When I start my research I often look at what the company’s values are, this is a big factor because I want to know what their goals are as a company. After research, I practice interviewing with questions that I feel would pop up in the middle of the interview so I can be fully prepared.
The implied “2 hours of chopping down the tree” from the quote is the interview itself. I know that with all of my preparation I have done, I will be the best version of myself when I start talking with the company.
My main takeaway from the quote…
You could easily just take six hours to cut down a tree with a dull axe and you could eventually get it done. However, if you spend time sharpening your tools then you can finish the job in only two hours because you prepared all of your tools to complete the task efficiently. This idea can be used with just about anything in the life of an employee and I hope you can translate it over to whatever you need!
Check out our career toolkit for resources to help with your job search & interview preparation!
By: Cade Blalock
