iron sharpens iron, but only at the right angle

There's a particular sound that a straight razor makes against a leather strop when the angle is wrong—a dull, hostile slap that suggests you're about to have a very unfortunate shaving experience. I learned this from a grandfatherly man on YouTube, whose channel I discovered during one of those periods in a young man’s life when he suddenly becomes painfully aware of the social value of maintaining a somewhat orderly and civil appearance. For those like me who discover straight razors, this typically coincides with that same period where one becomes enamored with the prospect of owning many leather-bound books, or becoming a learned gentleman who knows the meaning of the word “ambergris”. It's the same impulse that makes men buy vintage typewriters or learn to make their own bitters—the desperate hope that adopting the grooming habits of nineteenth-century barbers might grant you their gravitas.

The YouTube gentleman had a beard that cascaded down to his chest, which seemed like a conflict of interest for someone teaching straight razor technique, like a bald man selling shampoo. But he knew his angles. "Spine leading, about twenty degrees on the strop," he'd say, demonstrating with the certainty of someone who'd learned this truth through painful trial and error, "twelve to fifteen degrees on the stone when honing. Too steep and you'll roll the edge. Too shallow and you're just petting the leather."

He had a whole philosophy about it: the blade must meet the strop at just the right angle to align the microscopic teeth of the edge without folding them over. Wrong angle? You're not sharpening; you're destroying. And sometimes, he said, you have to flip the blade entirely—spine leading instead of edge—when you need to be shaped rather than sharpened.

I think about this sometimes when I watch people collide with their rivals—that same grinding sound of the wrong angle, metal against stone with no refinement, just damage. Which brings me to a story about two chess players.

Every Thursday at three o'clock, in a park where the pigeons had learned to recognize the regulars, two men met at the same concrete chess table. The younger man was perhaps forty, the elder somewhere past seventy, with hands that moved pieces with unconscious precision.

For three years, the younger man had not won a single game.

At his chess club downtown, he was formidable. He'd developed his tactical strengths—aggressive openings, brilliant knight play, devastating combinations—by repeatedly defeating players who simply couldn't overcome these weapons. Victory after victory had honed these specific tools to a sharp edge. But like a boxer with a devastating right hook who never learned to jab, his strengths had become a crutch.

The elder dismantled these approaches with casual efficiency. "Your knights dance well," he said once, after a particularly swift defeat, "but they're dancing to last year's music."

But after some time, the younger man did something remarkable. He repositioned. He started deliberately introducing his weaknesses into the game on purpose.

Not losing on purpose—that's different. He began deliberately choosing positions he was bad at. If he was comfortable with bishops, he traded them off early. If he hated closed positions, he steered toward them. The elder was forcing him to develop what he'd never needed at the club: versatility, patience, the ability to play positions where his strengths were neutralized.

He stopped trying to win—not in the sense of giving up, but in the way a medical student stops trying to impress the surgeon and starts trying to learn the surgery. Each game became a deliberate exploration of his underdeveloped skills.

More importantly, he started adjusting his timing. His instinct was to attack quickly, to overwhelm before opponents could regroup. The elder punished this predictability. So the younger man learned to vary his rhythm—playing fast where he usually played slow, holding back when he wanted to surge forward. He was learning to be uncomfortable.

He kept a notebook—not of positions, but of principles extracted from his defeats: "When he attacks my king, create an equal threat elsewhere." "He expects me to protect weak pieces. Sometimes abandoning them for compensation works better." "Positions I hate are positions I need to learn."

What happened at that chess table was precise: the younger player was intentionally presenting his soft spots to a superior opponent, like a blacksmith repeatedly heating and striking the weakest parts of a blade.

By the second year, something shifted. His friends at the club noticed first. "You're playing differently," one said, after losing a game he should have won. "It's like you're seeing around corners now."

What they were noticing wasn't improvement in his strengths—those remained largely the same. It was that his weaknesses had been transformed from liabilities into weapons. Positions that used to make him nervous now felt familiar. When the elder neutralized his tactical strengths, instead of forcing them anyway, he'd switch to positional play. When that was countered, he'd shift again. He was becoming unpredictable, not through randomness but through developed versatility.

The breakthrough came on a humid Thursday. The younger man created a position where his developed weaknesses combined with his natural strengths to produce something genuinely problematic. The elder paused—not his thinking pause, but something else.

"Hm," he said, which was new.

The elder still won, but he had to work for it, had to find moves that weren't automatic. By the third year, the younger man occasionally drew, and twice—twice in three years—he'd won. Not through his old brilliant tactics, but through patient repositioning, through finding angles where the elder's strength couldn't fully reach.

"You’ve become a valuable nuisance,” the elder said once, which was the highest compliment he'd ever offered.

Here's what those two men understood, though they never said it aloud: The way we interact with our rivals fundamentally shapes our trajectory of growth. Every rival offers a different angle of sharpening. Some test our strengths—we beat them repeatedly, our best weapons getting sharper but our weak points never addressed. These victories feel good but teach us little. Other rivals attack precisely where we're vulnerable, forcing us to develop versatility, to elevate our weaknesses into competencies.

Both angles matter, but we need to recognize which we're experiencing and adjust accordingly.

Of course, some rivals will crush us no matter how we adjust our angle—the pressure is simply too great for where we are in our development. Others we'll crush no matter what, learning nothing from empty victories. Neither is a rivalry worth continuing, and recognizing this is its own wisdom. A rival who destroys you without the possibility of growth is really just a bully.

The right rival is the one who beats you in ways that teach you, who creates pressure at angles that reform rather than deform. And how we position ourselves against that pressure—whether we keep hammering with our strengths or deliberately develop our weaknesses—determines whether we become sharp but brittle, or truly formidable.

We don't get to choose most of our rivals—they appear in our lives like weather. But we can control our angle. We can turn ourselves slightly when the pressure threatens to break us, not in retreat but in repositioning. We can deliberately present our weaknesses to pressure when we're strong enough to endure it. We can learn to recognize which rivals sharpen us and which ones just grind us down.

The younger chess player never became better than the elder. But he became complete in ways his chess club victories never could have made him. He learned that some rivals polish your strengths while others forge your weaknesses, and wisdom lies in knowing which one you're facing—and which one you need.

Sometimes growth means honing the edge you already have. Sometimes it means developing edges you didn't know you could possess. The trajectory of our development depends entirely on how we choose to meet the resistance we face.

The bearded YouTube gentleman was right about straight razors: the angle matters. Too steep and you destroy the edge. Too shallow and nothing happens at all. But just right—twenty degrees on the strop, twelve to fifteen on the stone—and the blade emerges better than before.

Iron sharpens iron, yes. But only at the right angle. And only if we're wise enough to know when we're the iron being sharpened, patient enough to endure the grinding, and humble enough to keep showing up every Thursday at three o'clock, ready to lose in ways that make us better.

The angle matters. That's what the YouTube man taught me about razors, what the two chess players discovered about competition, what we all eventually learn about growth. Some rivals will break you. Some you'll break. But if you're lucky, you'll find the ones positioned at just the right angle to make you better—and you'll have the wisdom to position yourself where the pressure becomes progress.

John

Thanks for reading The Mayfly Letter.

Your support allows me to continue doing something I truly love.

John Conrad