Long time no see...
Hey FriendsAndFamily,
I’ve wanted a way to communicate with all of you without relying on facebook. I know that we are all working on and thinking about interesting problems. I just don’t know what you are working on exactly. So rather than complain that facebook is addictive and sucks me into its newsfeed, I wanted to come up with something a little more wholesome to stay in touch even if we live far apart (I’m currently in Peru). This is all an experiment but my goal is to send out 8 updates by the end of March. I’ve been putting this off for months so here goes :-)
What’s going on...
Katherine (my girl;-) and I just got back from volunteering for two weeks on two sheep farms in southern Chile.
The main product was meat. Weirdly, both farms threw away the wool and skins as they weren’t profitable to sell. Makes me think there is a business opportunity there… We slaughtered two sheep, roasted them over fires and tanned their hides (and now have two sheep skins on the floor).
The pig liked being scritched.
The goat liked attention too.
The highlight for me was herding sheep. It requires a different kind of thinking than most work I’m used to like typing, sales or engineering. They move in a pack and can’t be alone. They don’t seem to think at all, except as a herd. Maybe that is why there is no plural of sheep ;-) The analogies to the whole world and how humans act in groups was palpable.
The reason we decided to volunteer on a farm was to see how we liked
traveling together,
working on a farm,
have a long vacation that didn’t cost much ($675 each including airfare and food over 2 weeks)
feel productive at the same time (I tend to feel restless on vacation if I’m not doing something) and
use different muscles (and parts of our brains) than our normal work (I was starting to get pain from typing)
The cultural exchange was wonderful as well. We helped a farmer list his products on Facebook, while we got to learn some of the native language, Mapuche and eat fresh blood jello .
(Blood jello tastes great, but my brain couldn’t come to terms with eating it)
Understanding the local Chilean accent is a challenge--Imagine trying to understand instructions in a foreign language if a quarter of the letters aren’t pronounced--“Mo’e the boar’ to the lef’. No, othe’ lef’.”
The farmer had bees too.
To put the starter bee’s wax on a bee box there is a trick. Pull the battery out of your VW Bus, connect the terminals to either side of the bee box wire for a split second and, voila, your wax will melt to the wire.
It was hard at times, but overall we had such a profound sense of gratitude to each other. And we still want to have our own small farm soon.
Weird thing I learned this week
Did you know chimps have far better working memory than humans? See if you can do better than a Chimp. I can’t…
What I want to work on (and maybe you can help)
I’m interested in starting a mastermind group for business where we meet up every week on Zoom to share our ideas and challenges in our careers and startups. I have been looking for a group but I realized I probably have friends who would want to do this with me. My experience as a startup founder was that it’s very lonely. There’s no one to talk to and all the time you have to put on a good face to your investors, clients and employees even if inside you are freaking out. Who can you talk to? Therapists are nice but they haven’t really been there so they don’t know either. Talking to other people in the same position is the most cathartic and the most helpful for actually solving the problem. Would you be interested in creating a group with me?
Okay. That’s all for now. I hope to hear form you as well.
Yours truly,
Kyle
Oh, and which of my farm aphorisms is the best?
Too many maggots means not enough chickens.
A sheep dog should be fierce enough to defend against the pumas but peaceful enough not to bite your sheep. (A dog killed one of the sheep.)
The art of sheep herding is to do very little; stay too close and you'll scare them.
As long as the horse fly is making noise there is no problem. (I think we all know a few people like this:-)
Horseflies and bees sound almost the same. Be careful which you slap.
Watch a bee hive for ten minutes as thousands bees zip in and out without hitting eachother and you'll realize that as long as we can create computers as smart as a bee then flying cars are possible. (This is for you Tim and Jim!!:-)
Lambs will nurse until they are bigger than the mother if you let them.
The best way to prepare for travel is not at all. After all, the objective was to go on an adventure.
Most people don't know that the brains of an animal are enough to tan it's hide. (This one has so many levels to it if you sit with it…)