We have a friend who posts a question to Facebook every day, soliciting responses from his friends. About a month ago the question was “What one thing would like never to do again?” Someone answered “15 hour flight in packed economy to Hong Kong”, and another person offered “Have a motorcycle crash”. I was still mulling over my answer when a mutual friend proposed “Pick rocks”. Pick rocks! Or as we called it, “picking stones”. Memories of that aspect of my childhood had been submerged for decades, but with those two words they came flooding back and caused me to reflect on my attitude toward work as a boy and a young man.
Even though the fields of my family’s farm had been cleared for 70 or 80 years by the time I was inducted into the spring-time ritual of picking stones, the annual freeze-thaw cycle and the process of turning over the soil with a plow every few years constantly brought new stones to the surface. After the fields were cultivated and seeded, those stones that lay on the surface would need to be removed or they would damage the harvesting equipment. And so my father would hitch a flatbed wagon to a tractor, muster whatever support he could from me and my siblings, and drive out to a freshly-seeded field. There, we’d drive up and down the length of the field, tossing anything fist-size or larger on the bed of the wagon. Larger rocks would be rolled into the bucket of the tractor’s front-end loader or hoisted onto the wagon by a two-person effort. When a section of the field had been cleared, the wagon would be pulled alongside a fence-row so the stones could be tossed onto a pile with those collected by the previous generation. At the end of the day, our hands would be bruised, our clothes covered with dirt, and our muscles sore from bending and tossing the heavy stones. There would be relief that the job was finished but little satisfaction in our accomplishment because next year or the year after there would be another crop of stones to pick.
If my father thought he was going to get some help on the farm when his first child turned out to be a boy, he must have been disappointed. I was small, sickly, and lazy, more interested in books and maps than crops and farm animals. For the most part, my father worked alone in the barn and in the fields, but there were a few occasions when he reached out to me for help—picking stones, moving cattle from one farm to another, cultivating the fields for planting in the spring, and baling hay. Once I was strong enough to lift the 50 lb. bales of hay, in the summer I was typically assigned to the hay mow, tasked with grabbing the bales from the end of the elevator and stacking them in tight rows in the mow. For sheer brutality, this job outmatched picking stones. On a hot day, temperatures high in the barn under the steel roof would rise to 35° C. or more; working shirtless for comfort, my arms and chest and back would be covered with prickly chaff and dust from the hay. Every few seconds another bale would drop off the end of the elevator until my father had unloaded the last bale from the wagon. Only then, while he went to the field to pick up another load from whoever was running the tractor and baler that day—my mother or one of my sisters—would I have a few spare minutes to stack the last of the bales and fetch a drink of cold water from the well.
Even though I may have done my part in those “all hands on deck” occasions that are part of the annual cycle of farm life, I still didn’t show up where it mattered the most—the daily routines that are an inescapable reality on a dairy farm. I didn’t show up to help with the milking morning and night, I didn’t show up to help clean the gutters every day, I wasn’t around to feed the heifers twice a day. It wasn’t until much later, when I was in my twenties (having discovered that there were no jobs for teachers at that time, and realizing that dairy farmers in southern Ontario would pay pretty good money to a person who knew how to milk cows and operate farm machinery) that I learned to work. Then, while working with some of the top dairy herds in Southern Ontario (including Oak Knoll Farms) I learned that productive, effective work entails doing all the essential things right, day after day, consistently, competently and on time– on top of making sacrificial efforts when the occasion calls for it. I also learned that the owner has a different perspective on work than the hired hand. One time, in corn-planting season at a farm in Wellington County, I thought I would show initiative by starting the morning chores an hour early—only to discover that my boss had been out on the field cultivating since 2 a.m.
From Doug Gregson at Oak Knoll Farms and other farmers who employed me from 1977 to 1982, I learned that attention to details matters—especially high-value details. Doing the right things in the right way at the right time matters. One farmer I worked for insisted that his herd be milked at precise 12-hour intervals because he believed (and research seems to support him) that this led to a small but measurable increase in milk production. Understanding which details matter separates a drive for excellence from perfectionism. Much later in life, while managing the fundraising program for a nonprofit organization, I knew that it mattered if we had duplicate names in our database (because donors would complain if they received two copies of the same fundraising letter) but it didn’t matter if the final version of the fundraising appeal was saved in two different locations on the shared drive.
We need to narrow our focus to the most important tasks at hand, and commit to completing them through prolonged effort and extraordinary attention to detail.
In Morten Hansen’s research into the behaviours that lead to high performance at work (which resulted in the book Great at Work), he found that employees who “chose a few key priorities and channeled tremendous effort into doing exceptional work in those areas greatly outperformed those who pursued a wider range of priorities”. Hansen describes this practice as “Do less, then obsess”. We can’t stress out over every detail all the time—we need to narrow our focus to the most important tasks at hand, and commit to completing them through prolonged effort (when necessary) and extraordinary attention to detail (always). This means saying “no” more often to distractions and competing opportunities, and directing our energies into our chosen priorities. Fortunately, the rhythm of farming allows for periods of respite from the long hours and intense attention to detail that accompanies planting and harvesting. The same farmer whose obsession with the task at hand led him to work through the night in corn-planting season took a three-week vacation in Australia between first cut and second cut alfalfa the same year. He knew that he could trust me to do most things right while he was gone, and if a few things fell through the cracks it wouldn’t matter a great deal!
Picking stones matters. I showed up when it was time to pick stones if—and only if—I was summoned by my father. Many other aspects of dairy farming mattered just as much, and I paid no attention to them as a boy. My mantra was “Do less, no stress”. Know what matters in your business, and dedicate your efforts to excelling at those priorities. Do less, then obsess.
Text © 2019 Edwin Wilson Banner photo by lcm1863. Some rights reserved.
