The first dresser took five hours. The second took one.

Last weekend I put together my first piece of IKEA furniture.

Let me be clear about how I feel about this. I basically consider myself a rugged outdoorsman. Weathered hands. Quiet competence. One small step away from wrestling bears in the wild. My wife has been generous enough not to comment.

What actually happened was five hours.

Five hours of laying every part out on the floor. Checking the picture, then checking it again. Working out which way round a panel goes before committing to it. Getting it wrong anyway, twice, and taking it apart to fix it.

And through all of it, the thing I kept noticing was the holes.

Somebody already drilled it

Every panel arrives with the holes already in it. Small ones. Barely worth mentioning. A dowel here, a cam lock there, a pilot hole so the screw goes in straight and does not split the board.

None of those holes are hard to make. I own a drill. I could make a hole.

But making the hole is not the work. Knowing where the hole goes is the work.

Somebody at IKEA worked that out. Somebody measured, tested, got it wrong, adjusted, and then froze the answer into the board itself so that I never have to ask the question. By the time the flat pack reaches my living room floor, the hardest thinking has already been done. And it was done once, for millions of people.

That is what a trodden path is. Not a shortcut. Not the work being done for you. Just the questions already answered, so your effort goes into the building instead of the deciding.

I spent twenty-two years walking on drilled holes

About four hours in, I realised I was thinking about my career.

I worked inside large organisations for twenty-two years. Alcatel-Lucent, Vodacom, Deloitte, Nedbank. For all the frustration of big companies, and there is plenty, I was walking on a path somebody else had trodden.

There was a way to run a project. A template for the deck. A finance person who knew the process. Someone down the hall who had done this exact thing three years ago and would talk you through it over coffee. A performance review that told you, however imperfectly, whether you were doing well.

None of it was perfect. Plenty of it was wrong. But it was drilled.

I did not notice a single bit of it at the time. That is the nature of a pilot hole. You only see it once it is missing.

Then in May I walked out, after 8,173 days, to build something on my own.

The board arrived blank.

No process. No template. No colleague down the hall. No review telling me whether I am doing well or quietly wasting a year. Every hole I need, I have to work out where it goes. I have to be the one who tests it, gets it wrong, and adjusts.

That is entrepreneurship, as far as I can tell so far. The work is not harder. It is that nobody has answered the questions.

Then I built the second one

Here is the part I did not expect.

We had bought two of the same dresser. So a few days later I sat down on the same floor, with the same tools, in front of an identical box.

One hour.

The same dresser. The same instructions. The same person. One fifth of the time.

Nothing about the second dresser was easier. What changed is that the path had been trodden. By me. Every question I had spent five hours answering, I had already answered. I no longer had to stop and ask.

That reframed the whole thing.

A trodden path is not something you either receive or go without. It is something somebody walks first. The five hours were not wasted. The five hours were the drilling.