Your biggest barrier to starting a business
Last month I gave a speech at the Natural Products Expo in California, and I took my son with me. Everyone’s an entrepreneur in my family, and my son’s first thought was that this would be a good way to expand his egg business. He knows the eggs he gets from our chicken coop garner a high price from natural food types.
“This isn’t where you sell regular food,” I tell him. “This is more like a convention for processed natural food. People can charge more money for processing eggs than selling just the eggs.”
“Maybe someone can process my eggs,” he suggested.
So I encouraged him to look around for someone to partner with who could process his eggs.
Mostly, though, he just found a lot of free samples.
But it was great practice for him. Because the biggest barrier to having your own company is finding a great partner. This is true for my son, and it’s true for you. Really. You probably think getting your business off the ground is more complicated, but it’s not.
Let’s say you don’t have an idea. You just need to find an idea person. (Look for an ENTP.) Let’s say you have a million ideas, but you never act on any of them. Partner with someone who is phenomenal at getting things done, day in and day out. (Find an INTJ) Maybe you already wrote the code, but you can’t figure out how to market the software. You need someone who understands what people want and how to sell it to them. (Look for an ENFJ.)
See how it works?
That said, I am not a big fan of the idea that everyone should run their own business. It’s simply not true. Running your own business is very risky and makes each day full of disorder and uncertainty. Also, running your own business usually puts your family on the line.
That said, the majority of people say they want to start their own businesses. What they think they want is to work for themselves. The benefits, of course, are clear. You don’t get fired, you work whatever hours you want and starting your own business is the only path to becoming a gazillionaire.
So here’s a plan for overcoming the biggest hurdle to being an entrepreneur.
1. Know your shortcomings.
An extremely wide range of personality types are able to be successful entrepreneurs. Research from Saras Sarasvathy at Darden School of Business found that the single, common thread among successful entrepreneurs is their ability to compensate for their weaknesses by finding the right people to fill in the gaps.
So, you need to really know yourself. It’s the only way to understand your gaps. The process of knowing yourself is difficult. Take the Myers Briggs. You’ll probably be disappointed but the good news is that there is no weakness that cannot be overcome with a good partner.
2. Grow your network.
I shouldn’t even need to tell you this, but people hate networking, so I have to say this. You should know, by the way, that introverts hate networking for sure, but everyone hates networking too.
Look, imagine you are the hot ex-cheerleader with an Ivy League degree and a six-figure salary. You still have to meet new people, right? And it sucks because all the men hit on you, so all the women hate you, and it’s difficult to find someone who could actually help you because you are performing at a level that’s much higher than most people.
See? Even the person who you’d think would adore networking actually thinks it’s a pain.
But you have to do it in order to have a roster of people to call on to help you fill in for your weaknesses. The key people in your network, according to the LinkedIn strategy department (which is from ancient times, when people looked at LinkedIn and asked what the purpose of the site was) you need 30 people who significantly different than you are—as in, not in your close circle, not in your industry, not your Myers Briggs type.
Finding those people is hard work, which is why entrepreneurs spend a lot of time networking. There are lists of startups that help founders find co-founders for their startups, but you still have to network. There’s no way around that.
3. Typecast yourself.
It’s not enough to know the person who can be a great partner for you. You have to be able to attract that person. Of course, you should go after a superstar, or something who is rising to that position. And the best way to attract these people is to differentiate yourself. You want to attract someone who has a special quality that you need, so you have to show the special quality you bring.
It’s harder than you think. You have to typecast yourself.
Ten years ago business schools started publishing research that the same rules of Hollywood apply to the workplace, and you will be more successful in work if you tell people what you do not do. You cannot be a star performer at everything, so if you don’t specialize then you can’t be a star performer at anything. You have to specialize to be a star at work.
Here’s a great example of Scarlett Johansson doing just that. TMZ reports that a sex shop near the US-Mexican border used her image on their business card without her permission.
You might expect a response from an A-Lister to someone stealing their image is to have no comment. Because it happens all the time and who cares?
But watch what Johansson does: “I actually have not played that many sexy characters! . . .the characters I play aren’t really traditionally sexy, I don’t think. I think it’s probably a reaction to the fact that I’m curvy and confident about it, maybe.” She can’t be a “sexy vixen” because it’s a cliché and also because she will be unemployable as she ages. But non-traditionally sexy, that’s a good one. That gives her some leeway. And “curvy and confident” makes her almost sound like a plus-sized model rather than a gorgeous Hollywood icon.
You need to be like that too, of course. Every time someone asks you “What do you do?” you need to reinforce your genre and your differentiator.
If you take these three steps, and take them seriously, you’ll be well on your way to having your own business. But during this process you are likely to discover that you don’t really want to run your own business. Are you an ISTJ? You could start a business. Anyone can start a business. But it’s likely that you’ll be happier being at an office that has a system and has rules and pays you to keep things in order.
The good news is that these three steps make everyone’s worklife better. Because if you don’t want to run your own business, you still need to stay employable. In fact, you need more than ever to stay employable if you don’t want to make your own company. And the best way to stay employable is very similar to the best way to be an entrepreneur. So there’s no getting around the work of doing these three things: know yourself, know other people, and define who you are so other people understand your value.
Your biggest career decision is who you marry
Sheryl Sandberg, the woman who runs Facebook, has said that the most important career choice you’ll make is who you marry.
I have to agree with this statement. Here’s why:
If you marry someone with a big career and you want to have a big career you have to find that rare mate who can treat you as an equal, even when your career needs to come first. These are very tough marriages to hold together because there is a constant, never-ending re-balancing of priorities and power between spouses.
If you marry a breadwinner who expects their career to come first, then things will probably only work if you can support that. Even if you have a career of your own. This is the easiest marriage to hold together (if any marriage can be called easy) as long as the man is the breadwinner.
If you marry someone who is terrible at earning money, or someone who is good at earning money but doesn’t want to, then you will have to take responsibility for earning the money.
In each of these cases, your career decisions are largely determined by who you choose as your mate.
If the idea of being in a long-term, committed relationship makes you sick, you should stop reading now, and click over to Beatrice de Guigne’s stunning parody of wedding photography, featuring Barbie and Ken. If you still hold out hope for marriage, here are my five favorite ways to get a spouse:
1. Network.
Getting a spouse is the first big test of your networking abilities. If you’re really well networked, like George Percy, then you can look around at who you know and who your friends know and pick someone.
If you go the networking route, the same rules of networking for a getting a job apply to networking to get a spouse. Which means that the most valuable people in your network are people who you are not that close to because those people will likely know a bunch of people who you don’t already know.
This seems like a good time to tell the story of how my brother met his wife. He came to visit me at college, and it was a weekend when there was a dance. And it turned out that my date was gay, and because I was so stupid about dating I was a) the only person in the school who didn’t know and b) too shy to cancel the date.
I asked my brother to come, to save me, but he needed a date. So I asked a woman in my suite who I had recently gotten to know.
The dance sucked, I couldn’t find my brother, and when I came home, he was making out with the woman in my entrance way. I remember standing there, stunned, and then saying: “What are you guys doing?”
2. Try online dating sites.
That was before dating sites. Today dating sites make things easier, for the lucky 23% of people who can get dating sites to pan out.
Most dating sites specialize. ScientificMatch matches you based on your DNA. Salon is for intellectuals. OK Cupid is more Jewish than JDate. JDate is rife with intellectual snobs and eastern-seaboard snobs who figure they can sort for their demographic by sorting for Jews.
Feeling frustrated and ripped off? Luvia specializes in people who want a better payment fee structure for online dating. Really. The founder of Luvia, Ravi, says: “There’s no monthly fee or any premium services fee. And registration is totally free. Luvia.com is very economical because we charge based on usage.”
3. Use a headhunter.
When I was thirty and not married and starting to panic, I hired a headhunter.
Here’s why: I was thirty, I had just launched my second startup after exiting the first one, and I was a former professional beach volleyball player. I knew I was a good catch, but I had no time or patience for dating.
The headhunter charged me $10,000 and for that, she taught me how you pick a husband. She told me you only get what you are worth. She told me that I’m an eight so I can get an eight.
Then she told me I could give her three criteria and she’d meet them.
First, I picked good looking, rich, and Jewish. She set me up with the only Jewish Calvin Klein model. I mean, maybe there were two, but it’s hard to believe there are two Jewish men as shallow as this guy was. Really. I think their moms wouldn’t allow it.
So I swapped rich for smart. And I got a screenwriter. Unemployed, of course. After all, I was in LA.
I knew I needed criteria to wipe out the screenwriters. That’s important in LA, because everyone’s a screenwriter. Even the homeless. Actually, especially the homeless.
I spent a lot of time developing a perfect list of three things, and I came up with Jewish, good looking and great at what he does. I thought this last one would be sneaky because you probably are smart and rich if you are great at what you do.
These guys were right up my alley—the type I was used to hanging out with. At work. So I had a hard time keeping dating talk to dating topics and almost all those dates turned into business meetings.
Just when the headhunter was getting frustrated with me, my ex-boyfriend told me he was in LA and asked if I wanted to get together for sex. I said, Okay, if we get married. He said okay. He bought me a ring from the LA County museum, on the way to my apartment.
We had sex. It seemed right because he was good-looking, Jewish, and great at what he did. (He was a video artist. One day I will spew my wide-ranging knowledge of video art on this blog.)
4. Go to therapy.
Hiring the headhunter was like going to therapy. You know, those fairy tales about having three wishes aren’t really about the wishes. They’re about learning what’s important to you. (Sylvester and the Magic Pebble is a fun, contemporary take on this story.) The fairy tales are about the power of self-knowledge, and how hard it is to come by.
Which is really what dating is all about. You have to give stuff up to get married. Picking a spouse is a lot like picking a location—it’s not about what you get, it’s about what you give up. You have to be really clear on what you are not willing to give up—because you’ll probably be giving up everything else. You have to assume you are. And it’s hard.
Most of adult life is about admitting what you will not be able to have or be able to do. Marriage is no exception. If you can’t accept that, going to therapy can help—you get stuck otherwise. Which wouldn’t be so bad if you don’t want kids. But stalled dating under the tick-tock of a biological clock is no good for anyone.
5. Compromise your career.
It’s true that who you marry is your most important career decision. But it’s also your most important financial decision, your most important parenting decision, and on and on. No one ever says that they knew what they were getting when they picked their spouse. Twenty years down the line, everyone is surprised.
So the choice is impossible to perfect because the information you have about your options is so poor. People change, and people don’t know who they are so they can’t disclose who they are. And life before kids does not resemble life with kids, so how do you even know how the person will react when the kids come?
It’s hubris to say this does not apply to you.
But of all the things that spouses affect, and with all the things you have to compromise in order to hold a marriage together, a career seems like a small price to pay.
People who are married are happier than people who are not. And I think it’s mostly that people are happier when they put the requirements of being in a committed relationship ahead of the other aspects of their life. And a career would be the first thing I’d tell you to give up. You can get a lot more from loving and being loved.
The career passion myth and how it derails you
You do not need to have a life full of passion. What is that life, anyway?
You probably don’t even know what passion is. But if you really thought about what you were aiming for when you talk about passion and careers, eventually you’d get to the idea of engagement.
This is not a controversial thought: that you would want to be engaged in your work. Engagement is one of the most important aspects of your worklife. Almost every study about what makes people happy at work comes down to engagement.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the book Flow, transformed the idea of work passion to be the idea of engagement. The work we do leading up to engagement is just practice time until we are so proficient at what we’re doing that we enter the state of flow, which is such a high level of engagement that we don’t even notice time passing.
Getting to the state of flow requires years and years of practice at a single thing so that work is so much a part of us that we can get to the high level of flow. (As I write this post, I think to myself that I should be there with writing, and I can get there sometimes, but then every time I think, “Am I there?” and I stumble. So part of flow is not thinking.)
Sonja Lyubomirsky talks about workplace engagement as a result of having control over one’s time and being able to make people feel good. Janitors, she finds, are happiest at work because they can control their workday and they can see immediately how they are helping people. Lawyers, by contrast, are the most universally unhappy, because they have little control over their hours and they are generally dealing with people who hate that they have to hire a lawyer, whatever the lawyer is doing.
Lyubomirsky’s research is freeing because she finds that happiness comes from the most simple lives, rather than the lives with big, complicated, impressive careers. (You can read her book, The How of Happiness to find out why I realized that it’s hopeless for me to be happy—I relish the complications of life too much. But there’s still hope for me in the engagement arena.)
When you say you want to do something you’re passionate about, you really mean, when you think about it, that you want to do something that is right for you. Something that is fulfilling and feels like the thing you should be doing with your life.
Ironically, you can prepare kids for this adult-life hurdle by letting them play unlimited video games. Because video games are engaging, challenging, and social. This is why I took my kids out of school. So they could learn how to find their own paths to engagement.
However schools train kids to subdue their own drive in order to pass required tests. Then we toss those kids into the adult world and tell them to do what they are passionate about. So you need to bridge the gap between what you learn in school to pass tests and what you need to learn about yourself to have a good adult life. This comes down to Myers Briggs.
So here’s the link to a fast, free Myers Briggs test for the millionth time. And that site will get 5000 visitors from my blog post. I am frustrated that I do not have a Myers Briggs test on my own site that I can link people to. If anyone is qualified and able to build me a test for my site, please email me. I’m sick of sending these people traffic. And anyway, they haven’t even ever sent me a thank you email, and that, after all, is one of the ways that I feel good about my work.
So go take the test. You will be one of sixteen personality types. Only two or three types of personalities are made for saving starving babies in Sudan, and rescuing crime victims from chains in dark basements. Most people would be psychologically destroyed doing that kind of work. Most of us need stability and order and predictability in our lives. Some of us need to control other people. Some of us need to be alone all the time. All of these types of people should not be doing that traditionally meaningful, passion-filled work of saving lives.
You will find, after discovering your personality type, that you are well suited for a particular type of work. It might not be what your dad wanted, or what your wife wants, or what fits your idea of who you wish you were. But if you do the work that meets the core needs of your personality type, you will feel passion. Because you will be engaged in your work. If you refuse to pay heed to your core personality, you will always feel that you’re searching for something elusive in your career.
Are you an ISTP? You need to use your hands to make things. Are you an ENTJ? You need to lead people. Are you an INTJ? You’ll go nuts if you don’t get something done every day. Are you an INFP? You’ll go nuts if you have to get something done every day.
Figure out what you need in your life to be fulfilled. Find that work. Then, as long as you have control over your hours and you can see how you help people, you will feel good about your work. And you know what happens when people feel good in their work? They stop asking themselves bullshit questions about what they are passionate about.
When to leave grad school off your resume
I have been railing against grad school for a long time, and I’m starting to believe that you should leave grad school off your resume if you are not working in the field you studied.
Here are five reasons why putting grad school on your resume makes you look bad. (And at the end of this post, there’s a game plan for what to do with any gap you’ll have when you remove grad school from your resume.)
1. Grad school on your resume is a formal announcement of a mistake.
If you are working in the exact field that you went to grad school for, then this advice does not apply to you. But most people do not get jobs that are directly related to their graduate degree. Most people did not need to go to grad school to get a job.
Which begs the question, “Why did you go?” For most people the answer will be that it was a mistake. It was a lot of time and money spent for a degree they didn’t need.
Other people will say they love to learn. This is not a good thing to say because it is not remarkable. At least, not among the people you need to be better than to get hired. Those star employees are learning all the time and do not take time away from work to go to grad school. Are you so stupid that you cannot learn without getting grades? Because this is what it looks like if you say you went to grad school because you love to learn.
You might say that you went to grad school because your parents were paying, or because it was a free ride. But this does not bode well for your work ethic. Because your time is valuable. Or at least you need to talk like it is, so that you can get someone to pay you for it. If you just went to grad school to kill time, you will probably kill a lot of time at work, too.
2. Grad school on your resume makes you look like you’re worth less money.
Going to grad school in a field unrelated to your job is like having an irrlevant job on your resume. And you already know that people leave stupid jobs off their resume. Grad school is like that — a stupid job that detracts from your story.
The story is really important: A resume is a story of how you managed your career in a way that is focused on what you want to do right now. You don’t need to tell your life story. You need to tell a story that makes you look like the perfect candidate for your perfect job. If your resume shows that you’ve done tons of things—like study law and work at an online marketing firm—then you look more like a generalist, and you won’t be as desirable. Specialists get more money than generalists.
3. Grad school on your resume makes you look like you’re scared of adult life.
Generally speaking, people who have huge excitement about creating their own path in the workforce do not go to grad school. People who have excitement about deciding for themselves what to read and what to learn are people who stop going to school and join the workforce. The workplace, done right, is a place for self-directed learning.
Most people who went to grad school did it to prolong adolescent needs for grade-based approval. (Note: This analysis comes from writers at the Chronicle for Higher Education.) This is because the model of grad school is generally outdated for today’s workforce, and high performers see this flaw before they enroll. But people who are scared to try holding their own in the workforce see grad school as a way around the inevitable difficulties of finding a job one enjoys.
4. A Ph.D on your resume often makes you look like a poor self-learner.
Graduate degrees in the humanities are totally useless. I should know. I went to graduate school for English, which served only to give me a little break from real life.
But it’s not just English programs that are dead ends. The Chronicle of Higher Education has reported that one would have had a better chance surviving the Titanic than getting a job as any type of humanities professor. Humanities PhD programs suck up time and energy with little return.
Most people who go to grad school for humanities defend their decision by saying they love their topic. But look, if you love your topic, open a book and teach yourself, after work. You don’t need permission, or a graduate degree, to become an expert in something you love. There is little correlation between education and success in the workplace. There is huge correlation between success at work and ability to be a self-learner.
5. Business school on your resume makes you look timid.
If you went to a top-ten school—top ten in the nation, not in your state—then the selection process is so stringent that it’s meaningful that you were accepted. Put the degree on your resume. For those who went to business school anywhere else, the selection process was weak because they make a truckload of money from each student admitted. So having made it into an MBA program there is no big achievement.
But really, if you think you’re good at business, why did you dump $100,000 into business school instead of investing it into your own company? And even if you wanted to learn about business, there are reams of data proving how you learn faster by having your own company rather than talking about other peoples’ companies. So putting business school on your resume makes you look like you don’t have faith in yourself.
Solution: Leave a gap in your resume. Really.
The strongest candidates have gaps in their resume. Taking time off is an honest way to learn about yourself. The interviewer will assume you did odd jobs to support yourself. (Which is what most people do when they are starting off in adult life.)
Instead of putting your graduate school degree on your resume, it will look better if you focus on the other stuff you were doing during that time. Travel, maybe. Or training for a marathon. Or learning to dance. You can tell people you took time off from the typical workday life of sitting in front of a computer. There’s intrinsic value to physically doing something, and you can talk about that when you talk about a gap on your resume.
When an interviewer says, “What did you do during this gap?” They don’t mean what did you do every second. They mean, what did you learn? And they want to hear self-learning, and self-knowledge. They don’t want to hear spoon-fed grad-school learning.
Some of the hardest parts of adult life are gaining self-knowlege and applying it to get a job that is right for you. The best way to show that you’re a strong performer is to tell the story of you facing this challenge head on, day after day, year after year.
How I decide where to focus my energy
Melissa’s in China, which means I have to wake up at four in the morning to talk, which means we have no phone calls, and her emails are unsatisfyingly delayed.
I miss her. She is with Steven, who I think is buying her a ring.
Going to China with Steven was a good idea because men love being in a foreign country with a woman who can speak the language. It’s similar to how men enjoy when a girl wears a wig or even a new necklace to have sex—they can pretend they are with someone new. (I read this in Cosmo, which is great for women with Asperger’s because it’s a rule book for dealing with men.)
So Melissa is going to get a ring soon, which is good because it’s a lot of work to find a guy to marry. When she’s not in China, I talk to Melissa on the phone five times a day, which is good for helping her find the right guy, because if you have a really good friend then you put less pressure on the other parts of your life to be completely fulfilling – like a mate or a job.
In fact, I think this is the problem with most peoples’ jobs. Do you know what post I link to more than any other post? The post about how your job cannot make a fulfilling life. This one.
I know I am the last person in America to see Season One of Weeds, but that’s what I’m watching right now. And actually maybe this post will be really useful to everyone because I tried to Google reviews of Season One that do not spoil the rest of the seasons, and it was pretty hard.
Wait. Sidetrack for a moment. I am going to say this because so often someone writes in the comments section that the post is not organized. But I want you to know that this post is like a messy desk—it looks messy to you, but I know exactly where everything is when I need it.
And I’m telling you I’m not disorganized but you are not believing me, probably, which is the true problem with a messy desk. You have to believe it when research tells you how other people perceive you. This goes for women wearing makeup to work, too. Just do it. Men take you more seriously if you wear makeup. The research doesn’t lie.
So back to the Google searching. Melissa is always telling me that I don’t need to have another startup idea. She is always telling me that I’m sitting on a startup and I’m not focusing on it. My blog. My blog is a publishing startup. I could be publishing books. I could be publishing other peoples’ books. In fact it’s insane that this paragraph is not full of a million links to stuff I’m selling you. I should write a book about Weeds, since I am now going to rank high in search results for season one reviews of Weeds.
When it turned out that my goat cheese business idea had terrible profit margins and a questionable ability to reach hockey-stick growth, I got upset. I have been researching and scheming about goat cheese, and then online food, and then online shopping models, for three years. But the idea isn’t going to work. Not for me. It might work for you, maybe. (Email me if you want help doing that business. You can have the idea.)
So I was moping and I was sending Melissa insane emails, like when I told her that I am infatuated with relational art and I need someone to talk to about it. I told her that I feel like Kurt Perschke’s red ball.
And I told her that I want to put myself in the weird places and disrupt peoples’ thinking the way art can.
I told her maybe I need to buy a new, great camera. Did you know her camera is as big as her head? I mean, she’s small. But still. Maybe my blog would be better if I had a camera as big as my head.
But Melissa said no to the camera. She said I have to think of my blog as a startup and I already have great photos with my iPhone and I should not distract myself with thinking I need better photos.
That’s what people do when they have a startup idea. Ben Casnocha‘s book My Startup Life has a chapter about how if you’re not working on stuff that really makes a difference, then you are not doing anything. Most people with a new startup do stuff like decide they need a new camera for the business, then distract themselves saving for the camera and researching it, then learning how to use it, and they avoid getting the startup done.
Ben, by the way, doesn’t want me to write about his old book. He wants me to write about his new book. The Start-up of You, which I like as well, (and not just because his publishing career documents the AP Style Guide’s treatment of the word startup). The book shows that entrepreneurship is really about taking control of your life, and you don’t need a big startup to be an entrepreneur — you need personal responsibility and intellectual exploration. It’s a great book to take the pressure off everyone who thinks they should do a startup but never will.
It’s hard for me to admit that I’m taking advice from a twenty-five-year-old who talks to me mostly about sex. (Ben’s latest question to me was “What do you think of monogamy?” which I mention only because it relates back to the part of this post about putting on a new necklace, and now you will think I’m juggling lots of topics in this post with amazing control instead of being buried in lots of topics.)
But Ben’s advice about starting a company is good: Stay focused on what you have that is going well and execute on that, every single day.
Which is why I’m not buying the new camera. You cannot have a solid career if you can’t take advice that you don’t want to hear. The advice you hate is probably the most valuable.
So I launched a new design for the blog. There’s a new homepage that matches the new sections: the blog, homeschooling, coaching, and mailbag. I hope you find new stuff to read that you haven’t read before. I hope you enjoy it so much that it’s like I got into bed wearing a new necklace.
And I’m taking pictures with just my iPhone. I think I’ll put one right here. To reaffirm that the photos are fine and you will like them.
But still, take a look at the photos at the top, from Melissa’s billion-dollar camera. There is definitely a difference.
Now back to Weeds. See, I didn’t forget. Just moving the piles around in the desk that is my brain.
The main character in Weeds is a mom whose husband died unexpectedly and left no money to support their upper-middle-class lifestyle, so she starts selling pot. And then she gets really good. She is actually, by the end of season one, building a really good business. And, of course, it’s so much easier for her to focus on that than on the problems of raising two teenage boys who just lost their dad.
I love this woman. When she opens a bakery to launder her drug money, I get excited for her that she has another business, and I find myself thinking that I should open a bakery. It would be great in the little town near our farm because people here still think it’s fine to gorge on carbs.
My point is that it’s so much easier for me to think of business ideas and distract myself with what could be next than to deal with what I have right here. If I would just focus, I could be writing on this blog three times a week. I’ve done it before, if you can believe it.
So I miss Melissa. Because I want to talk to her about how I am going to focus. I think she’s right that my business should be my blog. I think she’s right that I shouldn’t buy a new camera. When you have a friend who is right that often, you want her around to hear everything you think.
You don’t need a huge grand startup to make your life fun and interesting. You just need to have a challenging goal that you are trying to reach, each day. You need to be able to make money doing it: that is what a good job is.
A good life is something else. It’s the stuff that isn’t your job. Like, me helping Melissa to make sure she gets a ring before she goes on any more trips that look too much like a honeymoon. Or the woman in Weeds turning off her cell phone and dealing with her kids before her life crashes, no matter how good her business is. Your job doesn’t love you. Your friends do.
Savor success. Forget failure.
My son already has experience taking care of an animal and selling it. Last year, his 4-H project was pigs. He showed them, then he sold them, and we even went to the carcass show, which is where fifty people go into a meat freezer with a agriculture professor and find out why one kid’s carcass got a blue ribbon and one kid’s got a white ribbon.
If you guessed marbling, you guessed right. But the Farmer says this is an outdated way to look at meat. He says you get lots of marbling from feeding animals corn instead of letting them graze on the grass, but corn feed is like candy feed because there’s so little nutrition.
Okay. So even though we fundamentally disagree with the carcass show judging process, my son did take care of animals and then kill them, which is no small feat for a kid transplanted from New York City to rural Wisconsin.
In fact, I’d have to say that by now, my son’s childhood is more like the Farmer’s than mine. For instance, I walked out the back porch one day, and I saw my son chopping wood with an ax. Where I grew up, swinging an ax is like swinging a gun. Dangerous and only for crazy people.
So the Farmer and I agree to disagree, and when my son swings an ax over his head, I turn the other way. And pray.
I defer to the Farmer when it’s time to sell the goat. He says it’s fine to keep goats as pets, but we cannot keep having babies if we are not selling them.
My son likes the babies, so he agrees to sell one of the males so we can get the two females pregnant. He is selling Samuel, our favorite goat.
I try not to dwell on the favorite part. But we climb into the trailer and give him kisses goodbye before we start our trip to the auction house.
My son understands that if he is going to learn how to operate on the farm, he needs to stay far away from me. So when it’s time to sell his first goat, he rides in the truck with the Farmer. I follow along in my car
My son is excited. He feels grown up. And he does calculations to figure out how much money he’ll make from the sale.
At the auction barn, there are lots of goats. My son and I are curious. We get out of the car. We traipse around. The Farmer tells us not to get muck on our shoes. Muck is not the word he uses. Probably manure or something like that. There is lots of muck at the sale barn and the farmer does not want us tracking biohazards back to the farm.
Our farm is locked-down, or whatever the word is for the Farmer not letting other farm animal stuff onto our farm because of diseases. He has disease-free herds of pigs and cattle and surely that is from living for 20 years by himself. But I don’t say that. I just try hard to watch where I step.
I am concerned about how the animals are treated and I want to take pictures. I snap a few and the Farmer tells me that if they catch me we will not be able to sell the goat. PETA has come there. Or some PETA sympathizer types. In rural America PETA is a catch-all term for all people who are bothersome.
I take pictures while the Farmer is figuring out who is next and what we need to do to get Samuel into the holding pen.
I love when the Farmer takes charge. When we are fighting I tell him that I don’t need him to run a farm. I could run a farm by myself just fine. But the truth is that having him around makes my life so much more fun. I get to pick my head up and look around instead of sweating the logistical details of each step we make.
Samuel is scared, and I am scared watching Samuel be scared. We have protected him for so long. Someone left him to freeze in sub-zero temperatures two winters ago. We saved him. He is looking at us now, nuzzling our hands, assuming we are doing something good for him.
I look away so I don’t cry. I try to look away like I am curious and I sell beloved family pets for slaughter all the time.
My son answers the questions that the sale barn guy asks about breed, and age, and feed. My son knows everything about the goat but gets stumped when the sale barn guy asks for our zip code.
Right after, the Farmer puts his hand on my son’s back and says, “Nice job.”
My son is quiet. I know something is up because when the Farmer says nice job about something farm related, my son usually beams with pride.
The Farmer tells us to walk up to the auction room and wait for Samuel to come out for bidding. “See how much you get for him!” The Farmer says as he heads off to park our truck.
I walk with my son to the auction room but on the way, he starts crying.
Then I start crying. I say, “Do you want to bring Samuel home?”
“No. It’s too late.”
“It’s not too late.”
The Farmer sees us crying. He pulls me aside. He says, “It’s too late. Don’t encourage him by you crying, too.”
“He wants Samuel back.”
“He’s just sad. It’s part of the process of learning to farm.”
I turn to my son, “Do you want to take Samuel home?”
My son says yes.
The Farmer is so upset he has to go out to the truck.
I call to him. “Don’t be upset! I’m sorry!”
He says, “You can’t take an animal back. They don’t do that. It’s already processed in their system.”
“I can get Samuel back.”
The Farmer keeps walking to the truck.
I find the auctioneer. I tell him we are from New York City and we can’t sell our favorite goat and I am crying and my son is crying and they stop the auction and give us the goat back.
Then we are in the parking lot. Me, my son, and Samuel. Samuel is a bio-hazard now. He has poop from 100 other goats on his hoofs. I tell the Farmer I’ll put Samuel in the back seat of my car and we can give him a bath when we get him.
The Farmer looks down. Shakes his head. Laughs. He says, “No. Put him in the trailer. Let’s just bring Samuel home.”
This is the moment, right here, that determines what kind of person you are. If you see failure, you are a failure. And of course, failure is easy to see. We are not learning to be farmers. We are bringing bio-hazards onto the farm, and I’ve undermined the Farmer’s work teaching my son how to raise animals for slaughter.
There is success, too. There is the Farmer adjusting to our discomfort with farm life. He used to be much more rigid with us, and we would probably have had a big fight about this earlier in our relationship. I am helping my son to act on his emotions instead of hiding them. And, of course, we have Samuel back at the farm, and we love him.
Moments like this are so common in worklife. We can see success or we can see failure. We can choose. The right choice is to savor success and forget failure. That gives you energy to keep learning and trying new things. It gives you confidence to believe in your abilities. And remembering failure might seem educational to you—but it’s not. It’s a downer. So just forget it.
The Farmer usually approaches life this way, but this time, I wasn’t sure. Until we stopped for gas. My son wanted snacks. For himself and for Samuel. So we bought sunflower seeds, and while gas was pumping, the Farmer and my son stood at the back of the truck munching on seeds and sharing with Samuel.
When we got home, the other two goats were right there waiting, eyes glued to the trailer, looking for Samuel.
And when Samuel came out, everyone knew that the goats were now pets. So we compromised and got only one goat pregnant. We are learning how to be farmers, with some pets on the side. And the Farmer is learning how to raise a family, with some pets on the side.
