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I finally read the acclaimed book by James Clear, and I have to say, I understand the hype. One thing I learned through this book and other “self-help” motivational media is that much of what leads to changing your own behavior is decoding your responses and reactions to everyday things and creating conditions that lessen said friction.

For example, one of the things that’s helped me journal each day is to place the journal on my pillow in the morning after I make up the bed. By doing this, I lessen the friction of remembering to write every day. To go to bed, I have to move the journal. When I move the journal, I remember to write in it. This way, failing to write in my journal is a conscious choice rather than something I just forgot to do.

Lowering the friction of habits you want to keep is preferable to the “you just have to develop discipline” approach. Discipline is good, but it's always a fight, and who wants to structure their routines around fights? I’d much rather give my future self a hand than set up a contest of wills.

Friction is an underrecognized barrier to habit formation that Clear’s book helped make clear (sorry for the pun) to me. There are dozens of choices we make every day, seemingly small or insignificant choices, that can help or hinder our ability to get things done.

In the kitchen, one of the biggest persistent points of friction was maintaining the sharpness of my knives. I say “was” because that’s no longer an issue, but I want to unpack why dull knives are so awful and, more importantly, why I had such trouble maintaining them.

“A dull knife is a dangerous knife”, I’ve heard said by many a chef and home cook. It seems counterintuitive, but I boil it down to this: A dull knife is unpredictable, a sharp knife goes exactly where you want it to go. “Dull” is a relative term. A knife that’s too dull to easily cut through the skin of a tomato is likely still sharp enough to slice your finger to the bone. Almost every time I’ve cut myself in the kitchen is when I’m not paying attention to what I’m doing or when the knife I’m using moves suddenly in a way I’m not prepared for.

So why, if I hate using dull knives, was it so hard for me to keep them sharp? Well, until I used the sharpening system I’m about to explain, sharpening my knives involved a set of steps that created a lot of mental and procedural friction.

Traditional knife sharpening involves a wetstone that you soak in water for at least fifteen minutes before using. You then run your knife up and down the stone on each side, at the same angle to avoid inconsistencies in the edge that lead to dullness, and then you switch to a smaller grit stone — that also needs to soak — to finish the job.

I think everyone who uses knives should practice on a wetstone at some point, but the process is a bit messy and requires many repetitions to get it right and not erode the quality of your knife. I never mastered wetstone knife sharpening.

My knives never stayed sharp for long. So there I was, spending more time than I wanted, sharpening knives that only held their edge for two, maybe three weeks. This frustration only increased the motivational friction to even begin the process, and I abandoned many a sharpening sessions becasue when I had the motivation to get to the business of sharpening, I still had to wait to soak my stones. Then I’d contemplate the clean-up process and just decide it was easier to let my knives go for another week.

No discipline.

Or, maybe I just needed this virtually frictionless system.

If you consume any food or cooking content on Al Gore’s internet, then I’m sure you’ve seen ads for this knife-sharpening system.

And rightfully so. This system checked all the boxes I needed for keeping my most important kitchen tool in good working order:

1) Almost frictionless setup and breakdown. Take it out of the box, use it, put it back in the box. No soaking, now stand-by towels, just use it.

2) Consistent angle for the knife: 20 degrees for most knives and 15 degrees for more specialized knives like my boning knife. I cannot overstate the importance of maintaining the same angle while sharpening. A consistent angle means a sharper and more predictable knife.

3) It’s just frickin cool! Look at this thing! Isn’t it just dope looking! The cool factor is underrated because it’s the thing that gets you excited, and excitement leads to more use. I don’t always feel like sharpening my knives when that time comes, but knowing that I get to use a good-looking, cool-ass device usually overcomes my desire to be lazy.

Motivation is for drill sergeants and football practice; I’ll take the frictionless cool toy instead.

Just last week, I had a few salmon I needed to process from a trip back up in Traverse Bay. The salmon sat in my cooler a day longer than I had planned, and when the time came to fillet them, I was dreading the process a bit because my boning knife hadn’t performed well the last time I used it.

But that was before I had the Tumbler.

I had just sharpened all of my knives a few days before. I had those fish broken down in about twenty minutes, which was lightyears faster than last year’s processing. Filleting those fish was like cutting room-temperature butter and such a joy. The sharpness of my knife ensured I wasted less meat and dramatically improved my entire process.

As much as I love this sharpening system, there are things about it that I don’t love. The biggest is the cost.

A whetstone is 1/5 the cost or less. It’s also cheaper, in the short-term, to take your knives to a professional and have them sharpened. I even found a local knife sharpener who got my knives surgically sharp for only $10/knife. The edge lasted almost two months, but I never went back because the friction of driving across town was too great. There are lots of mail-in sharpening services that are more convenient, except for the fact that you’re without your knives for multiple days.

Professional knife sharpening systems like the one my local guy had are really cool, but more expensive than the Tumbler system. They also take up a lot more space in your kitchen.

You certainly can get a knife sharper with this system than you can with the one I use, but I’m not running a professional kitchen. If I owned a restaurant, I’d probably have one or several of these by Wicked Edge, but I’d also have multiple Tumblers around for quick maintenance.

Still, $160 for the Tumbler isn’t cheap, but I’d gladly pay double that for the way this system turned knife sharpening from a chore to a joy.

This system doesn’t work as well for all specialty knives, particularly hunting and pocket knives that tend to be shorter than kitchen knives. You can hack this system, though, by placing your knife on a block to raise the edge to sharpening height, or you can buy the mini Tumbler that was designed to tackle these jobs.

The weight of the roller is a plus for hand feel and use, but it’s a drawback for travel. I love being able to take this sharpening system with me, but the weight is not insignificant. This is probably the least significant of the drawbacks, and I wouldn’t want them to change the design to make it lighter. The roller’s weight is important; it’s just something to consider if weight is an issue when you travel with this thing.

All in all, I LOVE the Tumbler and can’t imagine needing anything else for my home-cooking needs.

Having the right tools for the job makes all the difference in the world, and having the right tools in the right condition makes all the difference in the universe. A sharp knife has lots of advantages, but one that I’ve not discussed is how a precision tool makes you a better relative to the animals you harvest.

When I first started getting serious about wild food, I was confronted with feelings of guilt when, in my processing, I would make incorrect or bad cuts that resulted in wasted meat. While field dressing a deer, I accidentally punctured their bladder because I had to hack through an adjacent section with my dull knife. I lost about 10% of the deer leg because the inner thigh meat was basted in deer piss.

One of the ways that we as hunters and anglers demonstrate our respect and hold the responsibility of the lives we take is by making sure we use said lives well. The better shape our tools are in, the better you can honor those lives and enjoy their sacrifice.

How or what you use to keep your knives sharp is less important than the fact that you keep them sharp. I think the Tumbler system is awesome at doing just that, and if you’ve been looking for a better way to sharpen your knives, then this tool will not disappoint.