I didn’t learn to use a chainsaw until I was 21, working at the University of Wisconsin’s Rhinelander Agricultural Research Station, up in northern Wisconsin. A couple of days after I started working on the research station, my boss taught me how to use a chainsaw and set me to felling some trees to make room for a new greenhouse pad. It being a state job, he insisted that I suit up properly, with protective chaps and a hardhat with earmuffs and an eye screen. I’d been around chainsaws before, but I’d never seen anybody working in such a ridiculous get-up, but I did what I was told.
(At this point, let me say that it’s really hard to kill a horsefly that’s chewing on your head when you are wearing a hardhat. Also, it’s hot and humid in Wisconsin in the summertime, especially when you grew up in Seattle [not hot] and spent the last two years in the desert [not humid]. The combination of horseflies, mosquitoes, and sweat was pretty darned distracting.)
(Also, I’m not sure that felling trees was the right job for a novice chainsaw user. But it was the work that needed to be done.)
Things got exciting at a number of points during the day, as I got the chainsaw stuck in the tree, and dropped a tree the wrong way and got it hung up in some branches, with nothing but my own youthful lack of good judgment to get it down. But nothing was quite as exciting as when I let the chainsaw bit full speed into my thigh – the chaps shredded and stopped the chain. I spent quite a bit of time digging the fibers out of the chainsaw, and then I had to explain to my boss why we needed new chaps.
At the time, I felt pretty unlucky. I felt like an incompetent fool, and I’d embarrassed myself in front of my boss and my new crew. But when I’ve looked back, I actually feel pretty fortunate to have made such a grand mistake so early in my chainsaw-using career. I learned my lesson and I learned it good, and I’ve never used a chainsaw without chaps and a helmet since, and I’ve never hit myself with the saw again. For twenty-some-odd years now, I’ve approached chainsaws with respect for how much they can get done, as well as how much pain and suffering can be caused by a moment’s inattention.
I had a different experience when it came to learning to manage people. In fact, I had the worst luck I could possibly have had when we hired our first full-time employee at Rock Spring Farm: he was great. Shaun was the kind of worker who bought into our enterprise just as fully as I did. He would match my speed and enthusiasm all day, and go in the house and make dinner for the family at the end of the day. When things didn’t work, he jumped in to figure out how to make them right, with no judgment at all. If the rain kept us out of the field one day, he’d stay out until dark to get the transplanting done when it did dry out. He rode his fellow employees hard so that we didn’t’ have to – and he did it with a smile on his face. And he’d come to farmer’s market after a 60-hour work week, and come home to watch the kids if there was something else that I needed to take care of.
And it was the worst possible thing, because when Shaun left at the end of the year, and we hired new employees the next year, I expected them all to be Shaun. As we doubled our production, bought a bunch of new tools, and entered into what would be a disastrous wholesale lettuce contract, we leaned on our crew, but found that we had entered a post-Shaun world. Where Shaun saw what was right with our farm, our new crew found the flaws. Where Shaun jumped in to make things right, the new crew stood around and waited for things to be fixed – and assumed that what went wrong reflected something wrong with us. When five o’clock rolled around, morale went in the toilet if we need to stay a few minutes late to get a job done.
And we had no idea what to do about it. Instead, we flailed around and yelled and jumped up and down and generally did a bad enough job of managing people that we drove a crew of ten people off the farm in the space of two weeks.
If Shaun hadn’t been so good, maybe I would have had to learn a thing or two about managing employees before I got in over my head. I think I could have saved myself a lot of pain and suffering if I’d learned to protect myself earlier in the game, rather than just bumbling forward and assuming everything would be okay.
If we’re lucky, things aren’t too easy when we’re learning, and we get the chance to make some mistakes before the stakes get too high. If things are easy, and we don’t make a bunch of stupid mistakes – or if we’re lucky enough that we (or our businesses, or our relationships) are wearing the equivalent of chaps and a helmet – we have to work that much harder to get the skills and assume the attitudes that are necessary to continued success.
(At this point, let me say that it’s really hard to kill a horsefly that’s chewing on your head when you are wearing a hardhat. Also, it’s hot and humid in Wisconsin in the summertime, especially when you grew up in Seattle [not hot] and spent the last two years in the desert [not humid]. The combination of horseflies, mosquitoes, and sweat was pretty darned distracting.)
(Also, I’m not sure that felling trees was the right job for a novice chainsaw user. But it was the work that needed to be done.)
Things got exciting at a number of points during the day, as I got the chainsaw stuck in the tree, and dropped a tree the wrong way and got it hung up in some branches, with nothing but my own youthful lack of good judgment to get it down. But nothing was quite as exciting as when I let the chainsaw bit full speed into my thigh – the chaps shredded and stopped the chain. I spent quite a bit of time digging the fibers out of the chainsaw, and then I had to explain to my boss why we needed new chaps.
At the time, I felt pretty unlucky. I felt like an incompetent fool, and I’d embarrassed myself in front of my boss and my new crew. But when I’ve looked back, I actually feel pretty fortunate to have made such a grand mistake so early in my chainsaw-using career. I learned my lesson and I learned it good, and I’ve never used a chainsaw without chaps and a helmet since, and I’ve never hit myself with the saw again. For twenty-some-odd years now, I’ve approached chainsaws with respect for how much they can get done, as well as how much pain and suffering can be caused by a moment’s inattention.
I had a different experience when it came to learning to manage people. In fact, I had the worst luck I could possibly have had when we hired our first full-time employee at Rock Spring Farm: he was great. Shaun was the kind of worker who bought into our enterprise just as fully as I did. He would match my speed and enthusiasm all day, and go in the house and make dinner for the family at the end of the day. When things didn’t work, he jumped in to figure out how to make them right, with no judgment at all. If the rain kept us out of the field one day, he’d stay out until dark to get the transplanting done when it did dry out. He rode his fellow employees hard so that we didn’t’ have to – and he did it with a smile on his face. And he’d come to farmer’s market after a 60-hour work week, and come home to watch the kids if there was something else that I needed to take care of.
And it was the worst possible thing, because when Shaun left at the end of the year, and we hired new employees the next year, I expected them all to be Shaun. As we doubled our production, bought a bunch of new tools, and entered into what would be a disastrous wholesale lettuce contract, we leaned on our crew, but found that we had entered a post-Shaun world. Where Shaun saw what was right with our farm, our new crew found the flaws. Where Shaun jumped in to make things right, the new crew stood around and waited for things to be fixed – and assumed that what went wrong reflected something wrong with us. When five o’clock rolled around, morale went in the toilet if we need to stay a few minutes late to get a job done.
And we had no idea what to do about it. Instead, we flailed around and yelled and jumped up and down and generally did a bad enough job of managing people that we drove a crew of ten people off the farm in the space of two weeks.
If Shaun hadn’t been so good, maybe I would have had to learn a thing or two about managing employees before I got in over my head. I think I could have saved myself a lot of pain and suffering if I’d learned to protect myself earlier in the game, rather than just bumbling forward and assuming everything would be okay.
If we’re lucky, things aren’t too easy when we’re learning, and we get the chance to make some mistakes before the stakes get too high. If things are easy, and we don’t make a bunch of stupid mistakes – or if we’re lucky enough that we (or our businesses, or our relationships) are wearing the equivalent of chaps and a helmet – we have to work that much harder to get the skills and assume the attitudes that are necessary to continued success.