Is Your Neighbor a Cowboy?

My next door neighbor is a cowboy. A genuine cowboy. Sure, he has worked in real jobs most of his life, but such is the fate of most cowboys these days. It’s hard to make ends meet on a cowboy’s wage in the modern world.

You might think it’s rather difficult to find a real cowboy, and if you do you are right. But in case you ever need one (and I have found them very useful to have around at times), I’m going to tell you the secret to determine if a person is a 100% bona fide cowboy. Here is the process:

First, find a person who looks and acts like a cowboy. Odds are that will disqualify him immediately. But don’t give up quite yet. If he meets this criterion, move to the next step.

Second, he must have cows, a good horse, and a saddle. See if he has cows. If he doesn’t have cows, he must have a good horse. If he doesn’t have a good horse, he must at least have good saddle. Check to see if his saddle is well-used and well-taken-care-of. If it is, go to the next step.

Third, ask him if he has ever turned a bull calf into a steer. If the answer is “Yes”, go to the final step.

Fourth, ask him if he is a cowboy. If he says anything other than “Yes”, you have found the genuine article. Examples of acceptable answers are “No.” “Well . . .” and “Pardon?” If he says “Yes”, he is not a cowboy. Find a new candidate and return to the first step.

Note: In the fourth step, the only case in which “Yes” is an acceptable answer is if your candidate follows it immediately with a gruff “What are you?”

Knowing When to Say When

Records of the ancient Greek Olympics speak of phenomenal long jump distances of 40 or 50 feet by some of those naked Greek Olympians you’ve heard about. For many years it was widely accepted that the distances were simply false; nothing but fables designed to glorify the Greek athlete to future generations.

Then some -ologist found some interesting rocks and came up with a theory.

He had been digging around in Greece and found several pairs of large stones with what appeared to be handles carved in them. One thought lead to another and this is what the guy figured out: The stones were used by the long-jumpers who would run with a large stone in each hand. At the point of takeoff, while still holding the stones, they would thrust both hands in front of them in an upward swinging motion. The added momentum from the heavy stones would then carry them farther than they could have jumped without them.

The only problem with this theory came when test athletes were unable to duplicate the historic distances using the described method. But that all changed when one of the athletes had a brainstorm. He attempted jumping with the stones, but at the apex of his leap he swung both arms quickly backwards and cast the stones behind him as hard as he could. This action propelled him several yards farther than any of the athletes had jumped on previous attempts. With practice, several of the athletes were soon matching the distances recorded in the ancient records.

When I heard about this interesting discovery, it reminded me of something I experienced while living in Sweden many years ago.

A kind Swedish family who lived near a lake had been feeding a family of swans for several weeks. The two adult swans had been raising three cygnets (baby swans) all summer, but the Swedish winter was setting in. None of the family of swans would leave because one of the cygnets had deformed wings and could not fly. I told the Swedish family that if the swans did not fly soon, they would freeze in the forming ice and die.

When they asked what I thought they should do, I told them that I thought the cygnet with the deformed wings would have to be killed. The family bond of swans is so strong that the two adults and the other two cygnets would stay and freeze to death rather than leave the deformed cygnet alive and alone. The family scoffed at my suggestion and continued feeding the swans, hoping they would fly south before the lake began freezing.

About a week later, one of the family’s neighbors came upon the poor deformed cygnet barely alive, frozen in the ice. The other four swans were close by but had managed to free themselves by beating the ice with their strong wings. Mercifully, the neighbor shot the cygnet. The next morning, the family of four swans left the lake, flying south for winter.

So what do these stories have to do with anything?

Well, I’m not going to claim they are metaphors. And if they are, they are far from perfect. They just remind me that we all carry around things that we would be better off without. They may even be things that seem valuable, or that were once valuable; things that helped us get somewhere or achieve something, but have since become nothing more than heavy stones dragging us to the ground.

Maybe it’s that old shirt that just doesn’t look decent anymore. Maybe it’s a memory of a fight with a loved one from months ago. Maybe it’s envy or spite or fear or guilt. Whatever it is, kill it. Throw it behind you as hard as you can. In doing so you may find you propel yourself farther and faster than you ever thought possible.

A Cactus Ain't So Prickly

 Blogger's Note: The following poem is a favorite by my good friend and cowboy poet, Grizzly Hackle. It is published here with his permission.



A Cactus Ain’t So Prickly

by Grizzly Hackle

A cactus ain’t so prickly if you love it fer its thorns.

A longhorn cow’s quite lovely when y’appreciate her horns.

I’ve never found a stock pond too polluted for a dip

While on a summer cattle drive or cross-country cowboy trip.

Sometimes a girl’s purtier when her hair ain’t combed just right.

Besides, who’ll see her hair when the lights go out at night?

Sometimes it seems in life we start to noticin’ the bad

When we really should be lookin’ for the better things instead.

Don’t get me wrong. The world is full of things that ain’t so nice,

But every time I find one, I count a good thing twice.

Anyway, what good’s the summer sun ashinin’ in the sky

If you ain’t been cold and wet and wanted to be dry?

"Nadine" - The newest member of the herd.

The Miracle of Time

I don’t think I’ve ever been called a “techie.” Although I’ve spent most of my career in Sales and Product Management for technology companies, I still prefer a shovel in my hand to a cell phone. Like many people, however, I am consistently amazed at the technology that has been developed over the last 15 years or so. One of my favorites is Google Earth.

It is amazing to me that I can sit in bed with my laptop and peer down at my own house in a photo taken from a satellite orbiting miles above the earth. Then, with a few clicks on the keyboard, I can jump over to my favorite beach on Maui or my childhood home in Portland, Oregon. It is absolutely incredible!

So it has been with some techie-like anticipation that I have been waiting almost three years for Google to update the photo of my property.

Two years ago we built a new house on our little farm in Northern Utah. It replaced the manufactured home that was on the property when we bought it back in 2004. Once we moved into the new house, built just a few steps to the west of the existing home, the little double-wide was ingloriously cut open like a trout and hauled away in two pieces to take on its new calling as a cabin in the mountains of Wyoming. I do not miss it and neither, it seems, does Google.

Two weeks ago I pulled up Google Earth and clicked on our address. To my delight I zoomed in and found an updated photo of our property that includes the new house. Even more delightful was the fact that I could tell from the picture the day on which it was taken – June 18th, 2010.

Take a look. See the green truck with a red trailer parked in the driveway just south of the garden. That truck and trailer were only parked in my driveway on June 18th. It was the day I hauled goats to the fairgrounds for our annual Utah Dairy Goat Association goat show. The only other time the trailer was attached to the truck in my driveway was at night on the 19th, and clearly it is very much daytime in the photo.

Neat, huh?

But as I looked further, I found something even more interesting. The vegetable garden (that big patch of dirt with some faintly visible rows and mounds in the lower left of the photo) was still almost entirely bare in the picture. But how could this be? I had been watering the garden and pulling weeds earlier in the day and it looked nothing like that.

The day I found the new picture on Google Earth was just over four weeks from the day it was taken. By the time I saw the photo, I had already cut Swiss chard once and it was growing a second crop. The corn had tassels and was as tall as I am, the sunflowers even taller. Tomatoes and squash were setting fruit. The Zucchini was tumbling out of the garden as if off a production line. How was it possible that four weeks earlier the garden was almost bare? It took me a few minutes to justify the picture taken just a few weeks before with the current state of the garden.

Then it settled on my mind. It was simple. It was the miracle of time. When comparing the picture with the actual garden, the change seemed miraculous. In the same way you are amazed at the change when you run into someone who was years younger the last time you saw them, I just couldn’t quite believe how the garden had changed in the four weeks since the photo was taken.

If I were to take a sunflower seed and place it in the dirt on a Friday night, would you believe me if I told you that by the next morning it had grown to be a plant of 7 feet tall? Of course not. So why does it not amaze us that the exact same thing happens, but just takes a little longer, as a matter of fact?

A broken arm healed in an instant is an unexplainable miracle. A broken arm healed in 8 weeks is . . . well . . . it just is. A boy grown to be a man overnight a la the movie Big is Hollywood fiction. If it happens over ten years, we don’t think to be amazed. You get the idea.

Take time out of the equation, and you often get what we can only call miracles.

So be patient. Wounds will heal. Pain will subside. Troubles will pass. Things will change in miraculous ways – with the passing of time.

All's Well That Ends Well

Talk with folks who train horses and they’ll tell you some interesting things about the way a horse’s brain works. First, a horse has a very short memory when it comes to connecting two events, or, rather, connecting cause and effect. Second, a horse tends to remember the way things end, but not much about the way they start.

Since I began working with horses about 15 years ago, I have tried to use these horse tendencies to my advantage. I always offer reinforcement immediately. My rule is a two-second rule. If the horse does something I want it to do, I offer positive reinforcement immediately. If it does something I don’t want it to do, I make sure that the horse knows within the count of two that the behavior is undesirable.

In training sessions, I always make sure that I end with something positive. If I am working on backing up, for example, and the horse has been refusing to do what I ask, I never, ever end the session with a refusal from the horse. I make sure that the horse gives me something. Even the smallest of steps in the right direction gives me a chance to reward the horse and end the session on a positive note. The horse is then prone to remember that training is good because it ended good, even though the majority of it was bad.

We have found that these techniques are helpful with other inhabitants of the farm as well, namely the dairy goats.

Like most livestock, goats require routine care that can be uncomfortable or even painful for them. Besides the twice-daily milking, they must occasionally receive medication and vaccines, have their hooves trimmed, or even be tattooed. We have employed a simple reward system that helps make the goats very easy to work with in all these instances. It is as follows:

When you are done you get a cookie.

I told you it was simple. Here’s how it works inside the goats brain:

Hey, that guy is coming to get me to take me into that white shed. Cool! I am going to get a cookie! I love cookies! Cookies! Cookies!

I proceed to take the goat to the shed for milking or trimming or vaccinations. It really doesn’t matter, because when I am done I give the goat a cookie. The goat returns to its pen:

I got a cooooookie? I got a cooooookie!

You get the idea.

“But wait,” you say. “I don’t train animals. I don’t even have a dog. What does this have to do with me?”

Imagine my amazement when I discovered that we, as humans, do the exact same thing as horses and goats when it comes to remembering events.

A study was performed in which volunteers were required to undergo two separate experiments in random order. In one experiment, they held their hand in a tub of water that was exactly 57° F for 60 seconds while continually recording with a dial their level of discomfort. In the other experiment, the same volunteers held their hand in the same tub of water for 90 seconds. For the first 60 seconds, the water was held at 57° F, but then secretly raised to 59° F over the last 30 seconds. In this experiment the volunteers also recorded their level of discomfort just as they had on the first.

What were the results? Well, the initial results were exactly as you would expect. In the 60 second experiment, participants recorded a level of discomfort that was moderately high. In the 90 second experiment, they recorded an almost identical level of discomfort, except it lasted for 90 seconds. So, in aggregate, the participants experienced 50% more net discomfort in the 90 second experiment than they did in the 60 second experiment.

But this is where it gets interesting.

Several weeks after the experiments were performed, the participants were told they would have to undergo one of the experiments again, but they could choose which one. When offered the choice, 69% of the participants chose to undergo the 90 second experiment. Why? They said they remembered that the longer experiment was less painful. The fact that the 90 second experiment had ended slightly less uncomfortably than the 60 second experiment made a large majority of the participants remember the entire event as less painful.

So if perception is in fact reality, we humans have brains that at least in some ways work just like our animal companions'. Kissing a booboo makes it go away, a lollipop from the doctor makes a shot hurt less, and all is well that ends well.

You Never Know Who’s Going to Buy an RV

My friend Matt is a dude. Not the kind of dude who tucks his jeans into his boots or wears a straw hat to a horse show in the middle of February. Matt is the kind of dude you might find sitting on a Southern California beach, soaking wet and covered in sand with a surfboard at his side; or maybe in line for the chair lift at one of Utah’s great ski resorts, wearing a classic tuque with the newest flavor of snowboard strapped to his feet.

If a toy has been made that glides, rolls, skims, jumps, peddles, paddles or slides, Matt has owned at least two.

And Matt is generous. In the almost two decades we have known each other, I have been dragged behind his boat, ridden his motorcycles, and borrowed his snow shoes a dozen times or more. For several years, Matt even kept a beautiful wooden canoe and two paddles not so subtly hidden in the main stairwell at his office so that anyone who wanted to could enjoy a paddle around the small decorative pond just outside the cafeteria.

In short, Matt is one fun guy to hang out with.

But don’t think Matt is the classic slacker. He isn’t. He is a well-educated, highly-skilled engineer and businessman who has made a fine living in the software industry. This is where the RV comes in.

In 1997, Matt and I were both working for a small software company when it was purchased by a much larger company headquartered in Japan. As part of the acquisition, the executives at our company arranged for a certain amount of money from the purchase to be set aside for the employees. Each employee got a certain amount of this “start happy” money based on tenure, position and current salary. Because Matt had been at the company for several years and was an integral member of the management team, he started quite a bit happier than most of us. With his windfall cash, Matt decided to top off his toy collection with a piece of equipment he had wanted for some time: a motor home.

After a few weeks of investigation and research, Matt and his wife got up on a beautiful Saturday morning and drove to the RV dealership just a few miles up the interstate from where they lived, fully intending to buy a motor home; a very nice motor home; a very expensive motor home; with cash.

They were in every way a salesman’s dream that day, with one exception: they didn’t look the part.

I can picture what they must have looked like that morning. Matt was probably wearing leather sandals and some faded khaki cargo shorts, topped off with a souvenir t-shirt from a recent mountain bike rally, road race, or one of the local micro-breweries; his not long but longish dark, wavy hair and scruffy beard making him look even younger than he was. His wife certainly matched him in attire as they both walked onto the RV dealership lot with a certain casual, “just looking around” demeanor.

For two hours they walked in and out of RVs, trying to decide exactly which one they liked best, while one of the salesmen occasionally trotted by and asked “How ya doin’?” or “Ya doin’ alright?” Not once did the salesman ask them what they were looking for or if he might be of assistance. Not once did he acknowledge that they just might be two people who would, in fact, buy an RV. He was too busy with customers who, by his assessment, were more likely to be buying. In fact, in the two hours they were at the dealership, no one even bothered to introduce themselves or ask them their names.

So Matt and his wife did exactly what most of us at some point in our lives have wished we had done, but didn’t. They got in their car, drove 30 miles to the next nearest RV dealership and bought their new motor home. When he got home that evening, Matt called the inattentive salesman from the first dealership and told him exactly what he had done and why he did it.

As someone who makes a living as a salesperson, I can tell you that the salesman who got that call was sick for days thinking about what he missed through his poor judgment and inattention.

Since the day he recounted it to me, I have turned Matt’s experience into a life motto. In both my professional and personal life. I try to carefully examine the manner in which I judge people based on their outward appearance or demeanor.

Have I missed making a new friend because someone didn’t fit into my rigid definition of friend?

Have I mistreated a stranger because they were too different from me?

Have I lost a business opportunity by assuming that the person on the other end of an email or phone call just wasn’t the kind of customer I was looking for?

When I catch myself making these kinds of decisions, I stop and remember my friend Matt at the RV dealership on that bright Saturday morning . . .

. . . and I remind myself that you just never know who’s going to buy an RV.

It Tastes Like Milk

A man sits down in a diner. “What's the special?” he asks the waiter.

“Tongue sandwich,” the waiter replies.

“That’s disgusting!” says the man. “I could never eat anything that came out of an animal’s mouth!”

“What’ll you have then?” asks the waiter.

The man shrugs and answers, “Just give me a couple eggs over easy.”

Like the man in the diner, all of us make judgments about the way things are that seem completely rational to us. We hold on to these ideas for long periods of our lives, believing they prevent us from making bad decisions or having uncomfortable experiences. In some cases we guard them like valuable treasures that must be protected at all cost. But very frequently, we are wrong. Our judgments are often based on something other than reality, whether upbringing, culture, fear, past experiences or some other seemingly compelling yet inaccurate standard.

So what should we do about it?

In my family, when we tell people we raise dairy goats, almost without exception they begin asking a series of questions that to them must seem completely reasonable, but to us have become an inside joke.

We grin at the first question:

“Dairy goats? What do you do with dairy goats?”

“We milk them.”

Then we have to giggle at the inevitable second question :

“What do you do with the milk?”

“We drink it.”

The third question is always the same:

“Really? What does it taste like?”

“It tastes like milk.”

But no matter how many times we go through this exercise with some newly curious visitor to the farm, we find most people cannot quite understand what we are telling them. They carry with them ideas that have lead them to form unfounded conclusions about milk. They believe milk from a goat must taste like something other than the milk they get from the store. It must be goatier or farmier or non-real-milkier than real milk. Why? I have no idea. But I can tell you that before we started raising dairy goats, we each went through this exact same process.

So, as is almost always the case, we have to sit them down, put a glass in front of them, take a bottle from the fridge, and pour them some milk - goat milk.

They raise it to their mouth then set it down without tasting it. “What does it taste like?”

“It tastes like milk!” we insist.

“OK.” They pick the glass up again and smell it. “Hmmm?”

Finally, after some persistent prodding, they causally shrug and they drink it.

“Hey!” they proclaim licking their lips, “It tastes like milk!”

In doing so they abandon the ignorance that just a few minutes ago had them convinced that milk from a goat didn’t, couldn’t and absolutely would not taste like milk.

Just Start

This August will be my twenty-first wedding anniversary. Of the many lessons I have learned in these twenty-one years, one of the most helpful has been that it is usually best to just get started.

Sometime in late 1993, I had a poignant conversation with my father, then about age 60. SueAnn and I had been married three or four years. I had just started my first job out of college. We lived in a small apartment, had one car, our first baby was on the way, and I made $10.24/hour. Seeking some kind of affirmation that I was moving in the right direction, I asked my dad if looking back he would have done anything different in his life.

His answer surprised me.

"You know, Tyler, I have spent my whole life waiting for circumstances to be just right so I could do the things I always dreamed of. Now I'm 60 years old and I still haven't done most of them. If there are things you really want to do in life, don't wait until everything is perfect. Just do them."

Being, like my dad, a person who wants everything perfect before starting down a particular path, the advice seemed simple enough, but was very difficult in practice.

Enter my wife.

SueAnn is a starter, maybe even an instigator. She always has been. She sees no error in starting a project even if conditions are not quite right, or the outcome is uncertain, or the method is not quite sound. For many years, this frustrated me to no end. I felt as if all I ever did was go around cleaning up after my wife. To be honest, I still feel that way sometimes.

But at some point (I'm not sure when) her "starting" taught me that no project could be completed, no goal reached, no dream realized without first starting. Just starting.

So although I have still not become everything I dream of, let me tell you some of the things I am.

I am a father.

I am a land owner.

I am a cowboy.

I am a farmer.

I am a mentor

And now I am a writer.

Move another item from the "Wish I Was" column to the "Am" column. And all I had to do was just start.