The Cow Barn Secret will help you live a happier life.
If you are an agency owner, business coach or consultant, here is a hard truth about growing your business: When you compare what your business is now to what you want it to be, you’re resigning yourself to a life of business unhappiness.
That is the core principle of a great book, The Gap and The Gain. This principle really applies to all business owners.
In their book, organizational psychologist Benjamin Hardy, PhD and entrepreneur coach Dan Sullivan, relate scientific concepts that help explain why we tend to focus on the future, and how we can train ourselves to focus on the past instead.
Hardy and Sullivan argue that making this change to focus on past gains can drastically improve your quality of life and your business. In the book, they elaborate on the psychological concepts and discuss how empirical research has supported the book’s main ideas.
Hardy says your ideal self is constantly changing, making your goals impossible to reach. Instead, you should compare who you are now to who you used to be so that you can see how far you’ve come. This simple shift in thinking makes all the difference in living a happier life.
Sounds like The Cow Barn Secret to me.
I wish you could have been there when my father gave The Cow Barn Secret to me when I started working on our dairy farm at the age of six.
I did not realize the full power of this new employee HR pep talk until I was delivering his eulogy 50 years later. The Cow Barn Secret helped him escape a country ravaged by Nazi occupation in WWII. The secret helped him survive three bouts of cancer. The secret helped him grow three businesses in America.
My father, an immigrant Dutch dairy farmer named Jack deVries, gave me the secret to surviving the problems life and business throw at you. And now I will share the secret with you.
When I was in kindergarten I began my job on the family dairy farm in Chino, California. Every day after school I had chores that involved feeding and herding the cows. That was the easy work.
On Saturday it was a different story. I was to report to the dairy cow barn at 7 a.m.
Now during a week, a great deal of cow crud accumulates on the cement walls of a cow barn. When my father first showed me those walls, they looked as long as a football field to six-year-old me.
My father gave me a bucket of hot sudsy water, rubber gloves and a metal scrub brush.
“I have a very important job for you,” my father began. “There are these things called germs, but you can’t see them. They are invisible and they grow on the dirty walls. Now, the government inspector comes by regularly to measure the germs. If we have too many germs, then we can’t sell our milk. The inspector will pour it into the gutter and we get no money for food. Do you understand?”
I liked to eat, so I understood. I also understood my father hated those government inspectors.
“Now, I need you to clean the walls but in a certain way,” my father continued. “I want you to do it walking backwards. Face the front wall and take a step backward. Then take the brush and scrub the wall. Just think about making that little section clean. When you have cleaned all you can on that part of the wall, take another step backward and clean the next part of the wall. Keep looking at the parts of the wall you have made clean. Now you try.”
I took a step back, dipped the brush in the hot water, and cleaned all the crud off that little section of the wall. I admired the part of the wall that was clean.
“Good job,” said Dad. “Now keep it up and keep working backwards. Before you know it, your rear end will hit the back wall and you will know you are done. Then you can go home and I will cook you your favorite breakfast, eggs, bacon and fried potatoes. Then we will watch the Bugs Bunny Road Runner Comedy Hour together. Cleaning the barn will take no time at all.”
But then Dad got stern. And forgive me, I am directly quoting a Dutch farmer here.
Dad said: “I have to warn you, whatever you do, don’t turn around and face forward. If you face forward and look at all the s*** that’s ahead of you, then you will get discouraged and it will take forever.”
As I was delivering his eulogy, I suddenly realized my father did not need a six-year-old to help run his business; he was training a six-year-old how to run a business.
There are a great deal of problems in business. Yes, a lot of crud we have to deal with. If you focus on all that you have yet to do—the gap and not the gain—you will get discouraged.
But if you take it one step at a time and focus on the small part you need to do right now, then pretty soon you will have much to admire (the gain). When you reflect on what you have accomplished, then you will be motivated to accomplish more. Set monthly goals for growing your business and keep a list of the gains.
You will be amazed at what you can accomplish by stringing gains together.
