I’m not really sure how it happened, but I get quite a few people contact me for advice. Not just about cattle either. I have a few that are chronic callers. They call me A LOT, and never do anything. They never buy any cattle to get started. They never pull the trigger to start that great business idea they have. They just call me and run idea of the week by me. Some numbers are programed into my phone so I know not to answer.
I asked one of them this question this last weekend. “Do you ever just get tired of talking about it?” I got a bit of awkward silence.
Seriously people, at what time to you just get sick and tired of talking about it. When I was a kid all I wanted to do was ride bulls and raise cattle. I didn’t just talk about it, I went and did it. The world we live in is about action. Thing is, if you know where you are going, and prove you can get things done, the world has a way of making a path to your door. If all you do is talk about it the world has a way of beating you down.
I have many ideas why people probably never get started. I’ll discuss three here
First is the fear of success. That’s right. Some people have been broke for so long they just can’t imagine anything else. Success would push them out of their comfort zone. Having success first means you will have to finish things you start. You will have to become a person of action. This will bring new responsibilities. When you begin to make money and build equity your current group of broke thinking friends will push you out of their group. New opportunities will come your way, and at first that is weird.
Second is the fear of failure. I don’t need to spend much time here. We all know this fear. These are the guys in the coffee shops I have blogged about before. The ones that sit there and brag about how their life could have turned out different if they took that one shot. I guess there must be some value in having the opportunity to tell that story. Maybe we all heard them tell is so many times, or we hear it from loved ones like grandparents or our parents that we have concluded that is where the bar is set? Just yesterday I was driving down the road and I was thinking of how I used to make fun of mediocre, and found myself wishing people would at least strive to be mediocre today. Yes I think we’ve sunk that far. After reading everybody’s thankful lists on Facebook, and seeing/hearing about the black Friday chaos, yes we have become a society of degenerates.
Third. We do not love small. I wish I had a nickel for every time I told someone to keep working that job in town, and go buy twenty head of cattle to get started. Live off your job and reinvest profits from the cattle to expand your herd, only to have that person scoff at me. “I can’t make a living off 20 head.” I sat at a town hall meeting this summer with our Congressman and heard a kid in his early 20’s tell our rep what a joke the beginning farmer programs are. He can’t get enough money to buy land and machinery, and make a decent living. I gave that kid an earful. (talking like that makes you a kid. His classmates that came from nothing had to join the armed forces. We call them men/women) If we gave this kid $1,000,000 to start a farming operation, my guess is he’d be out of business in 10 years, and probably declare bankruptcy on 1.5 million. If he can’t make it work as a small part time gig, what the hell makes him think he can make it full time? I started with 20 head. Built up from there. It took 10 years to become a full time occupation for me. Big operations don’t just happen over night for most of us. They start small, and grow. Think about it. It took your parents/grandparents a lifetime to get to where they are.
If and when you decide to try you will have failures, and successes. That is ok. We all need to get our nose bloodied once in a while.
Mr Cattlemaster 