Measure Twice, Cut Once

When I bought my first house some 30 years ago, I was young, ambitious, and wildly confident in my ability to take on home improvement projects I had no business tackling. It was during one of those early DIY adventures—armed with a circular saw and more enthusiasm than experience—that a mentor gave me a piece of advice that stuck:

“Measure twice, cut once.”

At the time, it was literal advice—offered just moments before I nearly ruined a perfectly good piece of trim because I was in a hurry. That simple phrase saved me from wasting materials, time, and the inevitable frustration of having to do the same job twice. Back then, I saw it as a useful trick for woodworking, a mantra for home repairs.

But now, several decades later, I realize it was never just about the wood.

That lesson has followed me through my career and into my current role—building complex identity solutions that power secure access for enterprises, governments, and everything in between. And the more I reflect on it, the more I see just how universal the principle really is.

In identity and access management, there’s no shortage of ways to go fast and break things. The temptation to rush into configuration, to push code into production without fully understanding the implications, or to start provisioning before the business logic is fully mapped out—it’s all too common. And it’s costly.

When you don’t take the time to plan carefully—when you don’t measure twice—you inevitably end up cutting something wrong. A misaligned role model. A poorly scoped connector. A governance process that introduces more friction than it solves. And like that trim board I nearly trashed decades ago, you’re left with something that doesn’t fit, doesn’t work, and needs to be redone.

Careful planning and thoughtful verification are the difference between a project that launches cleanly and one that drags on with rework, escalations, and patch jobs. Identity, after all, is foundational. If you build it wrong, it becomes a burden instead of an enabler.

Which brings me to another lesson, one taught to me by my mom:

“Haste makes waste… and a lot of stew.”

I had to laugh every time she used that phrase, but today I see the truth in it. When you’re in a rush—whether you’re cooking, coding, or configuring—you’re more likely to throw everything into the pot without thinking. The result? A big mess, and a whole lot of stew no one wants to eat.

In identity projects, stew looks like brittle scripts, orphaned entitlements, siloed data, and a help desk drowning in access requests. It’s what happens when we don’t pause to ask: “Are we solving the right problem, the right way?”

So today, when I mentor younger consultants or advise clients, I still say it:

Measure twice, cut once.

Think through your roles before you define them.

Validate your integration points before you automate them.

Confirm your governance model before you enforce it.

Because success in identity isn’t about how quickly you can deploy—it’s about how confidently you can scale, adapt, and sustain.

And sometimes, the wisdom that kept you from botching a home project at 25 is the same wisdom that keeps an enterprise secure at 60.