Chop Wood, Carry Water: The Zen of Ordinary Work

The Story

A young student arrives at a Zen monastery, eager to achieve enlightenment. He asks the master, “What did you do before your enlightenment?”

The master replies, “I chopped wood and carried water.”

“And what do you do now, after enlightenment?” the student asks.

“I chop wood and carry water,” the master responds.

The student is confused. “What’s the difference?”

The master smiles. “Before enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water. After enlightenment, I chop wood and carry water.”

The Paradox

This Zen koan presents a puzzle: If enlightenment doesn’t change what you do, what’s the point? The answer lies not in the actions themselves, but in the quality of presence brought to them.

The teaching: Before enlightenment, the student seeks something beyond the present moment. After enlightenment, the master is fully present in each ordinary task.

For technical leaders juggling architecture decisions, team dynamics, and strategic planning, this ancient wisdom offers a counterintuitive path: mastery lies not in escaping mundane work, but in bringing full attention to it.

What It Means for Technical Leaders

The Illusion of “Real Work”

We carry a hierarchy of tasks in our minds:

High-status work (in our imagination):

Designing revolutionary architectures
Writing visionary technical strategy
Speaking at major conferences
Launching game-changing products

Low-status work (that actually fills our days):

Responding to Slack messages
Reviewing pull requests
Debugging production issues
Attending status meetings
Writing documentation

The student’s mindset: “Once I finish these mundane tasks, I’ll do the real work.”

The master’s mindset: “This task is the work. How can I be fully present in it?”

The Trap of Destination Thinking

Before enlightenment (destination thinking):

“Once I become a principal engineer, I’ll be satisfied”
“After this project launches, I’ll finally have time to think strategically”
“When I learn Kubernetes deeply, I’ll be ready for the next level”
“Once we hit our scaling goals, the hard part will be over”

After enlightenment (process thinking):

The title is just a label; the work is the same work
Strategic thinking happens in the gaps of daily work, not in some future space
Learning is infinite; “readiness” is a myth
New scale brings new problems; there is no “after the hard part”

The insight: There is no future moment when the work fundamentally changes. There is only the continuous unfolding of this work.

The Discipline of Ordinary Excellence

Chopping wood and carrying water represents doing necessary, unglamorous work with full attention and care.

In engineering leadership, this looks like:

Code Review: Not just checking boxes, but seeing each review as teaching, pattern identification, and quality preservation. The boring PR fixing a typo gets the same care as the architectural refactor.

Meeting Notes: Not transcription, but distilling what matters and what was decided. This mundane task becomes organizational memory.

One-on-Ones: Not status updates, but genuine presence with another human navigating their career. The weekly rhythm is the practice.

Incident Response: Not just fixing the outage, but fully engaging with the system’s behavior, the team’s coordination, and the lessons available.

Documentation: Not a chore to defer, but the crystallization of understanding. Writing clear docs is teaching your future self and future teammates.

The ordinary work is the path. There’s nowhere else to go.

The Modern Resistance

We resist this teaching because our culture worships novelty, scale, and impact:

“Move fast and break things” → Do the exciting work, skip the boring maintenance “10x engineer” → Find leverage, automate away the mundane “Work smarter, not harder” → Escape repetitive tasks through cleverness “Growth mindset” → Always be learning something new, never settle

These aren’t wrong, but they can create a toxic relationship with ordinary work:

Maintenance feels like failure
Repetition feels like stagnation
Routine feels like lack of ambition

The Zen approach doesn’t reject efficiency or growth. It rejects the idea that ordinary work is less worthy of our full presence.

How to Chop Wood and Carry Water (Practically)

1. Ritualize the Ordinary

Create intentional practices around routine work:

Morning code review ritual:

Same time daily
Same setup (music, coffee, environment)
Same attention to quality
Treat it as meditation, not a checkbox

Weekly documentation time:

Block 2 hours every Friday afternoon
Update architecture docs, runbooks, ADRs
Not because it’s urgent, but because it’s practice

The ritual transforms routine into practice.

2. Find Depth in Repetition

Instead of minimizing repetitive tasks, explore their depth:

Debugging: Each bug is a conversation with the system. What is it teaching you about the architecture? The failure modes? Your own assumptions?

Refactoring: Each cleanup is an opportunity to understand why the code ended up this way. What patterns emerge across codebases?

Team processes: Each retro, planning session, or stand-up is a chance to observe team dynamics, communication patterns, and culture.

Athletes don’t resent practicing free throws. Musicians don’t resent scales. The repetition is where mastery lives.

3. Distinguish Process from Results

Results are outside your control; process is within it.

You can’t control:

Whether your RFC gets approved
Whether the project succeeds
Whether you get promoted
Whether your code review suggestions are taken

You can control:

The quality of thinking in your RFC
The care you bring to the implementation
The clarity of your self-assessment
The thoughtfulness of your code review

Focus on executing the process with integrity. Let results emerge.

This is not passivity—it’s directing energy where it’s effective. Chopping wood well, not worrying about how the wood judges you.

4. Practice Non-Attachment to Status

The master chops wood the same way before and after enlightenment because he’s not doing it to become someone. He’s doing it because it’s what’s needed.

Before: “I’ll review this PR thoroughly so I’m seen as a careful engineer.” After: “I’ll review this PR thoroughly because thorough review is valuable work.”

Before: “I’ll write this design doc to prove I can think architecturally.” After: “I’ll write this design doc because the team needs clarity on this decision.”

Subtle shift: From work as identity-building to work as service.

5. Be Where You Are

The most practical teaching: When chopping wood, chop wood.

In meetings: Actually be in meetings (not half-writing code)
When coding: Actually code (not half-checking Slack)
When thinking strategically: Actually think (not guilt-tripping about unread emails)
When mentoring: Actually listen (not planning your response)

Multi-tasking is the opposite of chopping wood and carrying water. It’s being nowhere fully.

The paradox: Presence in each moment creates more space than trying to be in multiple moments simultaneously.

The Limits of This Philosophy

This teaching is powerful but incomplete for technical leaders.

Where it falls short:

Strategy requires looking up: Sometimes you need to stop chopping wood and ask if you’re in the right forest
Systemic change requires disruption: Some processes need to be eliminated, not perfected
Ambition is not the enemy: Wanting to grow, learn, and have impact is healthy
Not all work is equal: Some tasks genuinely are low-value and should be automated or delegated

The balance: Be present in your work while still evaluating whether it’s the right work.

The master chops wood with full presence and knows when it’s time to stop chopping and build a sawmill.

Integration: Chop Wood, Build Sawmills

For modern technical leaders, the teaching evolves:

Chop wood with full presence (be here now)
Observe patterns in the wood-chopping (learn from practice)
When patterns emerge, automate or systematize (create leverage)
Then chop the next wood with full presence (repeat at new level)

This isn’t contradiction—it’s a spiral. Each loop deepens mastery while expanding impact.

Example:

Month 1: Manually review every deployment config with full attention
Month 2: Notice common mistakes, create checklist
Month 3: Build linter to catch those mistakes automatically
Month 4: Review fewer configs, but with deeper attention to architectural patterns
Month 5: Notice new patterns…

Each stage requires presence. Each stage serves the next. There’s always wood to chop.

Reflection Questions

What “low-status” work do you rush through to get to the “real” work? What would change if you brought full presence to it?
What future achievement are you using to avoid being present now? “Once I [blank], then I’ll [blank].”
Where are you chopping wood while thinking about carrying water? What does it cost you?
What ordinary work could become a daily practice if you ritualized it? Code review? Documentation? Team syncs?
Where is your ego driving your work? What would change if you worked from service instead of status?

Conclusion: The Work Never Ends (And That’s OK)

The student seeks the mountain peak where the work finally ends and peace begins.

The master knows there is no peak. There’s just this step, then the next step, then the next. And if you can be present for each step, each step is the peak.

For technical leaders, this is liberating:

You don’t need to “arrive” somewhere to do meaningful work
You don’t need perfect conditions to practice excellence
You don’t need to wait until you’re a distinguished engineer to make a difference

The work in front of you—the PR waiting for review, the design doc half-written, the team question in your inbox—this is not standing between you and your real work. This is your real work.

Chop the wood. Carry the water. Be here for it.

Before enlightenment: Chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: Chop wood, carry water.

The difference is everything.

2025-11-14

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