Motivation

My tractor is slow.

Time stretches while I putt-putt along, hauling hay from the stack to the cattle and sheep.

If I’m not careful, I will create a significant to-do list.

Or, even worse, mess around on my phone while I don’t watch where I’m going and end up driving into a mud hole.

Then my to-do list will involve a shovel and multiple wood blocks.

So I listen to audio books while I cruise the pastures.

Lately, I’ve been listening to business books so I might improve my employer skills.

After all, Jennifer plans to start work at A Land of Grass Ranch soon.

One of the books that captivated me was Drive, by Daniel Pink.

In Drive, Pink discusses how and why people work efficiently and choose to stay at their jobs.

Even I, who have never hired a person, know that hiring and training a new employee takes a lot of time, effort and expense.

Besides the money, it’s more fun to work with happy people.

Pink says people are hard-wired to crave three things in life: Autonomy, mastery and purpose.

They also need to pay the bills.

Pink suggests paying employees enough to live on -- or at least pay them the average wage within the industry -- then offer opportunities for autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Ranchers might not have a lot of discretionary income, but they should be the happiest people on earth.

Agricultural economists preach endlessly that a ranch must make a profit; too many ranchers make excuses for income-challenged livestock operations by enjoying the lifestyle.

It turns out, according to Daniel Pink, it really is all about the lifestyle.

We control our time.

We get to master the convoluted, intertwined systems for animal production, land and water health, and marketing.

Together, we feed our communities and our nation. If that purpose isn’t worthy enough, maybe we all should buy bitcoins instead.

Once, when I had a little bunch of cows and a work-from-home job, I found myself laid-off and searching for coins in cushions on the couch to buy milk.

After a few weeks, I was offered a job for double the highest salary I had ever earned.

That much money certainly would solve the issue of buying milk.

But they wanted me to be at work at 8 a.m. and stay there until 5 p.m.

Every weekday.

Jailhouse bars hovered behind my eyes.

I just couldn’t do it.

They thought I was crazy. They knew I needed the money.

I knew I needed the shredded scraps of control over my own life that I clinched as I searched the couch cushions.

In Drive, Pink talks about FedEx Days.

I love this concept.

For one day a week, an employee gets to work on an idea that will benefit the ranch however she wants. The only caveat is that, at the end of the day, she must deliver.

A FedEx Day is new to many industries, but ranchers implement it all the time, only sometimes the livestock create the idea.

Last week, I thought I had an easy day of sorting heifers ahead of me. I looked forward to a few hours of downtime afterward.

When I walked down to the barn that morning, I realized the cows had proposed an idea that would benefit the ranch.

 They were lounging contentedly in the lamb lot.

I opened the gate, pushed them out to the pasture and found my fencing twine.

I was about to master another hole in the fence and I could choose just how I would do it.

No wonder people romanticize ranching.