Wet Wood and the Art of Persuasion

At our house, out here in the countryside, we heat primarily with wood. Although we have a furnace, our preference, as long as we are around the house, is our air-tight wood stove which keeps the entire house nice and toasty. And you just can’t beat the smell of maple smoke on the crisp winter air.

All that to say, since leaving the city I have become quite expert at starting a fire, and I’ve learned a thing or two about firewood in quantity. Stacking twelve stove cords is close to Gladwell’s ten thousand hour rule.

As any Boy Scout will tell you, fire needs fuel and it needs air. In its early stages, it needs a particular type of fuel– very dry, very small, and with plenty of spaces amongst the fragments. For myself, I prefer freshly-shaved cedar curls piled over a few bits of birch bark. A single match will set that off every time. My practice is to have tiny kindling teepeed above that, then small kindling loosely over the tiny, then small dry sticks of firewood, then a few “regular” sticks, a bit on the smallish side. Within minutes the Napoleon is roaring, ready to receive anything that will burn, including even the odd block with ice still on it.

One last practical observation. Everybody knows that warm air rises, and cold air falls. This means that your two storey chimney, full of cold atmospheric air, will push a draft down into your stove and blow all the smoke out into the room, sending every fire alarm into the house into a wailing rage. A choir of eight fire alarms will even wake the dog, who will add to the din. So the moral of the story is that you need your starter fire to begin instantly, burn fast and hot, and get the stove door closed quickly so that the draft reverses with hot air going up the chimney, not down.

Now, the astute reader will see where I am going with this. How often we observe an attempt at persuasion which begins with throwing a large and heavy ice-covered proposition into the listener’s cold, unreceptive, and antagonistic mind. Whether met with anger, apathy, or resistance, the “persuader” is already a mile worse off than he was before he opened his mouth.

The smart persuader knows that you have to plan well, start small, build intelligently and get the updraft supporting you, not opposing you. Done right, the listener will soon enough accept even some “frozen logs”– but you can’t rush it.

It’s amazing what you can learn from just a simple analogy!