Suns Up Fatty

A long time ago I read and was heavily influenced by Seth Godin’s book “The Dip.”

Google AI summarizes it like this:

“The Dip by Seth Godin is a short business book that argues winners are often the best quitters, teaching readers to distinguish between a “Dip” (a temporary, worthwhile struggle) and a “Cul-de-Sac” (a dead end) to achieve success. The core idea is that every new venture gets hard, and the key to success is having the discipline to quit the wrong things and the persistence to push through the right ones to become the best in your field.

For me, identifying dips vs. cul-de-sacs is found in the data. “Does the math, math?”

For our farm dead ends have included:

• Farmers markets / popups / road side vending (we don’t live close enough to a major, consistent market to make the math work)
• Crops that sit in the field a long time (too much can go wrong and we can’t compete on price with the grocery store)
• 24-weeks of a CSA (competes with farm-to-school, team exhaustion)

None of those were bad things. The math just didn’t work and was never going to, so we had to push them aside to focus our energy on things that will work.

That leaves the rest of the stuff we’re currently pushing uphill.

• Taking our nursery year-round
• Long-term soil building
• Figuring out how to monetize our goats
• Wash/Pack/Cold storage — now that the grant money has dried up how are we going to fund that?

The trick with “The Dip” is that pushing a rock up a freaking mountain all the time gets tiring and annoying if you don’t make enough progress. Too little progress and you want to quit.

This fall and winter we’ve gotten tired and many times stopped to ask ourselves, “Why don’t we just quit the vegetable side of our business altogether, focus on a part-time nursery, grow some flowers, and get jobs?”

That’s the problem with being a mission-based person, isn’t it? We’ve said that our mission with the farm is to increase access to locally grown foods. When we ran the food pantry we saw that in the raw. We can’t escape reality— this area needs more fresh food, if we can build a system for that, we’ll be fine AND meet a very real need.

It’s a funny thing to start seeds and sign leases to expand your vegetable operation while also wondering if you can even sustain a vegetable operation for another year.

It’s a funny thing to think about applying to jobs and narrowing the business down to just the nursery and flowers while also talking to people about taking on much more land to grow way more vegetables.

That’s “The Dip”. Self-doubt, contemplating quitting, wondering if you’ll ever get this danged rock to the top of the hill– that’s all part of perseverance.

Look, I hate hiking uphill. I hate it.

But just like I’ve long said to people who are thinking about quitting boring, safe jobs to pursue their passion, “You’ll never experience the thrill of free fall until you jump out of the plane” I also know that as much as I hate hiking uphill there’s nothing quite as awesome as getting to the top, extending your tired, flopping arms to the sky and knowing you did something you didn’t think you could do.

Yes, we’re exhausted this time of year. Long nights, short days, lots to do– it’s not easy to stay motivated, especially when the local vibe is so negative right now. Then I turn the TV on to disassociate from that and the negativity on my TV isn’t any better.

So here I am.

Suns up fatty.

Time to feed some animals, plant some veggies, sow some seeds, and push that stupid rock.

The summit is somewhere out there. I’ll only get there if I keep pushing.