Farming: to quit or not to quit?
The hard thing about doing hard things is it’s always a lot harder than you expect. So it’s best to quit right at the start of the project. Quitting early will save a lot of heartache and pain.
The only time you should not quit is when you’re absolutely prepared to pay the price that this difficult project will inflict on you. But the problem is we don’t really know what the true cost is until we’re well into a hard project.
There are some very ambitious farmers in New Zealand with plans to sell their lamb direct to consumers, process their own milk, set up a tourism venture, or – the ultimate ambition – to own their own farm. These are all really hard things to do.
The key is to assess early on if the project has legs and to be realistic about what it will take to reach the end.
However hard you think it will be at the start of the project, multiply it by three and that’s a more realistic assessment of how hard it will actually be.
If there is any doubt about your willingness to go on, then you should quit early and put your energy into something else, because you won’t make it through the inevitable deep low.
There is almost always a deep low period.
Any difficult project starts off as fun and exciting but it gets more difficult as time goes on.
It gets to the point where it’s definitely not fun or exciting. In fact, you’ll absolutely hate the project and wonder why you even started it in the first place.
This is when most people quit, but it’s the worst time to quit. It’s at this point in the journey, when the entire project is at its lowest, that the real learning and insight takes place.
This is when you think in despair, ‘‘I can’t go on like this any more – there must be a better way.’’
The few people who push through this dark period are the ones who discover key insights that were not obvious before.
It seems we have to get ourselves into this state of despair with the project before we can truly look at it differently. Prior to this, we look at it through a positive lens with our bias blurring the truth.
There are a lot of sharemilkers with the goal of farm ownership. But many were ravaged in the last downturn.
They’re in that dark low point and they’re saying to themselves, ‘‘We can’t go on like this any more – there must be a better way.’’
Sharemilkers are taking quite different approaches to get to farm ownership now, with many coming to the conclusion that traditional sharemilking won’t work for them. So they are selling their cows and using residential property or investing in other investments that make a higher or less risky return.
They still have the goal of farm ownership, but are getting there a different way. Almost all are thinking, ‘‘This is way harder than we expected and it’s taking a lot longer.’’
When you ask sharemilkers who still have the farm ownership dream, ‘‘Why don’t you just leave the dairy industry and do something else?’’ they all say, ‘‘I love farming and can’t see myself doing anything else.’’ That’s the key.
If you’re going to embark on a hard project, you should only do it if you can’t not do it. If you don’t have that level of commitment you won’t get through the low time. You’ll quit.
Quitting is fine, but do it early, before you have to go through the low. So the key to doing hard things is to find out what you can’t not do and just do that. Quit everything else.
I suppose there’s another option too. You could just do easy things. But who wants to do that?