Plagued

Several years ago, I met a person who informed me that they had started a new vegetable growing operation and that they fully expected to make $100,000 in gross sales by their second year of operation.   They weren't asking for any feedback or advice, so I didn't offer any.  Clearly, they simply wanted me to be impressed that they were going to succeed and leave me in the dust - at least that was the implication they seemed to be pushing in our conversation.

Afterwards all I could think was that either they really did know something I didn't know or they were clueless and had no counter-balance to their overly healthy sense of self-importance and confidence.  Or perhaps, they just thought destiny/fate was going to smile on them in a special way.

Apparently, destiny/fate did smile.   But, the smile destiny/fate gave was either tinged with regret, irony or tiny bit of malice (perhaps all three) as this person didn't make it through their second year of growing.

Peanuts by Charles M Schulz

My favorite cartoonist as I was growing up was Charles M Schulz.  Even as a child, I found his humor and story lines to be amusing and engaging.  Now, as an adult (if I may be allowed to call myself an adult for the time being) I find even more meaning and humor in his work.  The cartoon above ran in newspapers on May 11th of this year and it reminded me of the conversation I outlined above.  It also got me to thinking, which is a dangerous pastime of mine.

Perhaps self-doubts, plague that they are, are healthy when you balance it with reasonable amounts of confidence, stubborn willpower, work ethic, knowledge, experience and critical thought.  Every diversified farmer that I have met and come away feeling that they were (or would be) successful expressed, in some way, that they had a healthy level of self-doubt.  This is not to say that they didn't also exhibit confidence that they would overcome adversity and do what was needed to succeed.  What I mean to say is that they weren't so blind to think that they were infallible.

The awareness of self-doubt encourages us to ask important questions - one of which is "what am I missing?"  After all, we are imperfect and we all have things to learn - even about the things with which we have the most familiarity.  So, here I am in May, plagued by self-doubts.  And, here I am asking myself, "what am I missing and how should I respond?"

We're not overconfident and we're keeping our eyes wide open.  We'll be fine as we follow our Paths to Produce in 2018.  We just need to remember that if we throw a low, outside-but-over-the-plate fastball to a left-hander, the ball is going to come back through the box at a high rate of speed and knock our shoes, glove, shirt, hat and socks off.