Embracing the Storm -Applying Lessons I Learned as a Ranch Hand to Entrepreneurship

To earn money for college, I worked on my stepfather Wayne’s ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills. During the summer our primary task was putting up hay, sustenance for cattle and horses during the winter months when snow blanketed the ground.

My job was to mow, the first step in the process. I drove an ancient Allis-Chalmers, a small tractor totally lacking in amenities like a cab, air conditioning or a radio. It had a six-foot-wide mower attached to the right side that roared like a Sherman tank. Hour after hour, I drove in an ever-tightening square until all the hay in that section had been cut. Once the hay cured, a process that took three or four days, my brother raked it into neat rows and then Wayne drove down the rows, the baling machine spitting out one fifteen-hundred-pound round bale after another. As my job had to be completed before anyone else could do theirs, I often found myself alone in the waning hours of the afternoon, cutting hay until right before supper.

One sweltering afternoon in late August, as I mowed a hay meadow a mile from the house, an enormous dark cloud appeared on the horizon. In Nebraska, watching the sky is a popular pastime because weather determines the rhythm of each day. Gazing upward becomes an unconscious habit, squinting at the sky, prognosticating about what a particular cloud formation might bring. This cloud, dark blue-gray and moving fast, definitely had bad intentions.

As it drew nearer, I noticed a distortion between the cloud and the ground. Something was falling - maybe rain, maybe hail. Within minutes the wind picked up and the temperature dropped at least twenty degrees. The sun disappeared. Lightning bolts danced along the horizon and heavy thunder rumbled through the valley.

There wasn’t a tree or building or anything even closely approximating shelter nearby. What if tornados lurked in that cloud? I had heard stories of people caught outside during tornadoes who found a low spot in the ground and somehow survived. There were no low spots in our hay meadow, and even if there were, that wouldn’t protect me from the lightning.

My stepfather had been struck by a lightning bolt in his twenties. It knocked him out cold for two days but left no lingering side effects, except an insatiable desire for chocolate ice cream. Once you've survived a lightning strike, you get to eat anything you want.

I pushed the funnel clouds and lightning bolts out of my mind. Going to the worst possible scenario would only feed my growing panic. I’d been caught outside in thunderstorms before. I would probably get soaked, but could withstand a little water. And I was wearing my lucky Nebraska Cornhuskers hat, surely that would offer some protection from the storm.

Hail stones make a distinctive sound when they hit the ground, a sharp thump, much different than even the largest raindrops. I heard the thumps before I felt the first one strike. An icy chunk the size of a golf ball ricocheted off the engine casing and hit me squarely in the shoulder.

I threw the tractor into neutral and crawled underneath it as the thumping accumulated into a deafening roar. The Allis-Chalmers had a narrow body and a high clearance, so it offered protection only for my head. The rest of me was fair game. Assaulted by pieces of ice ranging in size from a pea to a baseball, I made myself small, wrapping my arms around my head, like they tell you to do when an airplane is about to crash.

Why was I the only one working? Didn’t Wayne see the cloud? Why hadn’t he driven out to rescue me? Why was I even working outside when I could have gotten a job selling shoes at the mall?

Why me? Why me? Why me?

When you are an entrepreneur managing the many challenges inherent in trying to create something from nothing, it’s easy to fall into the “why me?” trap. But in the middle of a storm, being assaulted from all sides by things like product delays, cash flow shortfalls, missed deadlines and  unhappy customers, asking “why me?” doesn’t help. That knee-jerk reaction born of anger and self-pity keeps you in the problem.  A better question would be “how can I avoid this in the future?” 

I don’t know how long that storm lasted - the howling wind, ground-shaking thunder and the barrage of hail that turned the green field white – but I remember how helpless, frightened and trapped I felt.

There was no escape. 

I just had to take it.

As an entrepreneur, I’ve had meetings, phone calls and entire days that felt like that storm. And here is the truth - some days just suck and there is no escaping that reality.

I think entrepreneurs feel the suck more acutely because there is little standing between us and full force of the storm. We don’t have a big organization to insulate us or pick up the pieces of our failures. It’s just us.

The biggest lesson I learned in the hay meadow that afternoon was that sometimes the only option is to embrace the storm, feel the pain, sit alone with the fear and do nothing except breathe.  And if you keep breathing, the storm eventually passes.

After that August storm moved on to its next target and the sun returned, I crawled out from under my tractor and assessed the damage. The engine was still running, my heart was still beating and the ice chunks were already beginning to melt.

My whole body shook, from the cold and the aftermath of the adrenaline rush. Hot tears leaked from the corners of my eyes and I started to laugh. The storm had scared me, it had battered me, made me feel small and insignificant, at the mercy of something I could not control, but it hadn’t killed me and now it was gone.

I’d survived.

And the field still needed to be mowed.

I climbed back on the tractor, threw it in gear and finished mowing the last patch of hay. 

And that’s what I do as an entrepreneur. No matter how difficult things get, no matter how wounded or scared I feel after the world assaults me, I climb back on the tractor and mow the next patch of hay. 

And sometimes I have chocolate ice cream.