I apologize for my unexpected and unannounced absence last week. We took the kids on a trip and I do not like to advertise that I am going to be out of my house for many days before the fact. Because the looters. The media tells us these are difficult times.
So I am back home now, minus fifty percent of my celery plants due to a surprise heat wave. A shout out to the pumpkin plants that sustained nearly zero damage in our absence. Based on how well the pumpkin plants did without water during extreme heat, I am going to remind people during challenging times to imagine themselves as a pumpkin plant. I will nod knowingly after sharing this wisdom. Actually that is not true. I will sigh patiently and explain the difference between the celery plants and pumpkin plants given what I have learned in my haphazard home gardening experiments.
I am going to slightly change the subject now.
Today I am going to talk about next year. More specifically what my father told me about next year.
I wrote previously about stuff my father told me, and it was an absolute hit. It did not net me many nickels of shameless Amazon affiliate merchandise, but it resonated. In a sense I have become my father because almost all I do now is make new and interesting mistakes and then lament about them to anyone and everyone who will listen. In the not-so-distant future I will prepend these stories with “you know what is wrong with the young people today?”. Then the circle will be complete.
I digress.
My father was a farmer and he loved it. I loved farming a lot less than he did. I ran away screaming from farming at the first opportunity. It is why my life now involves so much computers and so little frozen manure and unchopped firewood. I will let your imagination fill in the details.
The one thing I will always remember about my father and farming is fall time harvest. At the end of the year, when the grain is all bagged up and the bales of hay are all neatly lined up on the field, I would walk around with my farm-loving father who would survey the harvest output. He would go through some mental internal post mortem and at its conclusion he would nod slowly and make a profound declaration.
“Next year will be better.”
After hearing him say this a few times, I did my own mental inventory of the year’s produce.
He would say this in good years and he would say this in bad years. At an early age, when the years were good, I was admittedly confused. My advanced math skills told me that this declaration made some sense during the bad years and that it made less sense during the good years.
I never challenged him on his declaration during the good years—I was too busy plotting my great escape from a life of chopping firewood and extricating frozen manure from one location simply to move it to another.
It was not until decades later that I realized that he never actually considered the year’s output in his declaration.
He was performing a ritual to help him prepare for the coming year.
Farming is a lot like running a startup. You have unexpected natural disasters, supply chain issues, and a host of other unfortunate surprises. Whether it is market economics or fields being flooded, bad things happen at an incredible rate in both worlds.
I remember the first time I had to shut a company down. I gave a thoughtful presentation at GDC if you are interested in hearing more about it. Disclaimer: I get zero nickels from GDC clicks—you can watch it free of concern that I am exploiting your thirsty eyeballs for the moneys.
After we went through the process of shutting everything down, I remember a moment where I was alone at home and feeling a sense of quiet deja-vu. It was like I was suddenly a teenager again, standing in a field staring at rows of neatly lined hay bales. I could almost feel my father standing beside me as if this was some kind of sappy Kevin Costner Turner Classic movie.
I do not know what possessed me to do so, but I nodded slowly and found myself repeating my father’s mantra.
“Next year will be better.”
I find that I have adopted my father’s farmer mindset now that I am in charge of all my decisions.
It does not matter if it is a good year.
It does not matter if it is a bad year.
I always tell myself that next year will be better.
This is such a super serious subject for me that I don’t know how to follow that up with a smarmy request for “blah-blah socials” or “something-something buy this”.
I will see you again next week.
