Because this is a blog about industry, I’ve made posts in the past praising the quality of hard work. However, there is one point I wasn’t so clear on, a point I want to touch up on today. I think working hard is a great quality to always have, however that doesn’t mean we’re always working hard on the right things. Sometimes, thinking for 10 minutes can get you more done and make you more money than working on the wrong thing for 10 years. To explain why this is, I bet you could come up with many examples in your mind just by thinking for 10 minutes. Let’s try this together. I plan to share a story which for me is the perfect example to explain what I mean here, but already I can think of other easy-to-understand examples.
Imagine if for the last 8 years you were slowly working on making a ring wall with stones around your farm. You knew this project would take many years to complete, so you embraced it and stayed consistent collecting boulders from around your farm so that week by week, month by month your ring wall began to form as boulders are stacked on boulders. Now, it’s been 8 years and you only have a few boulders left to find to finish your ring wall. That’s when you remember there was a local quarry that shut down 7 years ago and all the stone was just left there. For $14,000 you could’ve boughten all the stone, hired a company to transport it for you, and instead of laboring for 8 years you could’ve completed your ring wall in as little as a few weeks if only you had taken the time to THINK.
Thinking is the major underrepresented skill of any farmer. When drought comes, you have to think your way out of it. When your livestock gets diseased, you have to think and act fast before the whole herd gets infected. When you wake up hungover because your daughter got married last night, you have to THINK to get out of bed and tell yourself “There’s no days off on my farm.” I always stressed the importance of hard work on my blog, but now let it be known too how important thinking hard is.
The example I experienced in my own life recently, the one that made me want to add this farmer’s wisdom to by blog, will now be relayed to you for your reading and educational pleasure:
At about the beginning of spring, 2024, I saw my youngest daughter get married for the first time. Amazingly, in the same month, I also saw her step foot into the door of her dream career for the first time. Now these two events alone might be worth writing whole blogs about to most farmers, but here at Doug’s Blog of Industry where I like to ramble about old farmer’s wisdom is a place where I self-reflect on the less-talked-about serious matters of a farmer’s life. So, for that reason I won’t be getting all giddy to tell you how proud I am of my beautiful daughter for her marriage and career success. Instead I’m going to self-reflect, a little in shame, like an old man whose worked hard his whole life, because it’s actually quite sad how hard I worked for so many years to see my youngest daughter take over the family barley and straw business. Ever since she was a child I told my youngest daughter that one day this whole farm would be hers. But I never listened to her when she said she wanted to be a paramedic. When she was 8-years-old, she said she wanted to be a paramedic. When she was 18-years-old and I got mad at her for leaving the farm to pursue school, she said she wanted to be a paramedic. Boy, there’s so much time and hard work I could’ve saved if I had only taken the time to think for 10 minutes. The solution came to me after just a little bit of thought, when on the day before her wedding my youngest daughter told me for the last time that she wanted to be a paramedic, but that her older sister had always wanted to take over the farm. And she was right! 10 minutes of thought could’ve saved me and my daughters from so much emotional stress. I watched my daughter become the paramedic she always dreamed of becoming, and 10 minutes of thought told me my oldest daughter, the one who wanted to inherit the farm this whole time, was the right lass for the job.
So you see now how 10 minutes of thought can sometimes be more productive than 10 years of work. The same goes with 1 minute of thought and 4 years of work. It doesn’t matter about the numbers. The point is that, especially when you’re dealing with long-going matters that could easily be solved with better decisions, thought goes a long way to save you time and hassle. So make good use of it!