Transcription
What are some of the top things and quotes you learned from Joel Salatin?
Yeah, Joel, my mentor at 19. I think my favorite one, he said, "Ty, if you can't fix it with a sledgehammer, a digging iron, or crowbar, you can't fix it." He used to just whack things. Like, I need to take these old bolts out. We reuse some posts. They used to have a gate hanging on it. They were little. Some of the guys here, Rick was struggling to get this out. I'm like, "Get my sledgehammer." If you can't fix it with a sledgehammer, digging iron, or a crowbar, it's not fixable.
Some of my other favorite quotes from him are, "Hey Ty, it's your first day working for me on the farm. I only have one rule: never make a mistake." Now, I was young enough, naive enough to not argue with the man. If you say that now, people will be like, "I'm going to report you to HR. You're being unreasonable as a boss." But what he was saying is, become conscientious, organized, diligent, and prudent. He was saying, "Write down everything I tell you and double and triple check it." That's a great framework.
Now, society overly protects people, but you also protect people from success. When you protect people from pain, you also protect them from success. If you protect your kids from ever having any pain, you protect them from ever playing and learning to run around and jump and do jiu-jitsu and box and jump in a pond. So Joel wouldn't like Joel Ling about that politically correct nonsense. Joel's old school. He's like, "Bro, don't you just got one rule: don't make a mistake."
I used, I went to the grocery store. I bought, I remember I had a, I had this old car. What was that car? I had this Pontiac Grand Am. Somebody had given it to me. I grew up not very rich, but someone at our church won the lottery and they gave me a car. It's actually an interesting story about charity. I had just started giving more to charity and literally within a week of me, I was like, "I'm going to give 10% of what I make." I wasn't making much. I was probably making $300 a month or something in high school doing odd jobs. And I remember their name was the Paraso. It was, uh, what was it? Patrick, Patricia Paraso, or I, I don't know why I forget their name, but this couple, older couple. I started giving to charity. One week later, they're like, "Ty, we want to give you this car. We like, made a whole bunch of money and we're getting our daughter a brand new car and here you go." That's a, that's another lesson in charity. Boy, sometimes it comes right back around to you. It's pretty insane. But I, but you can't do it, you can't do charity with the hopes that something will happen good, but it just happened.
And anyway, back to Joel Salatin. I had that Pontiac Grand Am. I remember it was like pink or something. It was a girl's car. And he said, "Don't ever make a mistake." So I got in the car, went to the grocery store, and I bought those little, like old school little notepads that fit in your back pocket. And every time Joel said something, I'm like, "Well, I'm 19, I don't know any better. He says, 'Don't make any mistakes.'" I wrote everything down. And I'd go home at night and I'd be like, "Did I remember that? Okay, so did I do that? Did I move the cows? Feed the chickens?" That was teaching me hyper levels of conscientiousness and organization. Which, dude, that's good advice.
HR departments are saving people from success. Saving people. Hey, we're going to protect you from success too. We're going to protect you from accidentally making a million bucks. Uh, no. Don't worry if your boss is mean. Is he talented? I mean, assuming he ain't putting you on the rack and torturing you physically or something, whipping you, but besides that, in general, wealthy people are grumpy and busy. So if you want wealth, you're going to have to deal with a little grumpiness. I just read that Elon Musk biography. I think he throws things at people sometimes. Not great for HR, but you know what? If you work for Elon, you learn a lot. So is it better to have things? I don't know if that's true. That's maybe that's just the mass media, but I wouldn't be surprised. Ed, because people who are successful value their time and if you're frustrating to work with, they get frustrated. So Joel told me, "Don't make mistakes." It's a good thing.
Getting my, keeping the calluses. Don't ever become too much of a keyboard warrior. We set the posts. Now we're going to pull it tight. This is going to be for the horses to be on the back pasture. I like to put my back pastures that I can't put into hay because it's a little too steep, not too steep, give them access to the water, put gravel down there so there's no erosion, put some big rocks, some rip rap, it's called, that keeps the horse's hooves from eroding. Sometimes I'll run a pump so they don't erode the pond, but they won't. The way I set it up now, we just double their acreage. All this beautiful grass, they're going to be in heaven. They got a tough life. They get to eat and sleep all day and night.