OFI 1050: Don’t Put Off Today What You Will Regret Not Doing On Your Death Bed

Off-Farm Income

Hi everybody. I want to talk to you about life today. I heard from a good friend last night who I hadn’t talked to in a while. All through our twenties he never quite had the coordination or ability to play sports that the rest of us did, and then in his 40’s he was diagnosed with a rare, degenerative disease that explained what had been going on all of that time. And speaking with him last night, he told me that he was now having another issue, this time with his vision. Soon he is going to be traveling to Salt Lake City to see a specialist to rule out a different syndrome.

As I get to my late 40’s, I have been thinking about my parents some more recently. My mom was diagnosed with lung cancer when she was 53 and died when she was 58. Ironically, this episode is coming out on her birthday.

My father was diagnosed with renal cancer when he was 62 and died when he was 67. Both of them were heavy smokers, and both drank hard liquor nightly, for most of their lives. I don’t smoke or drink more than the occasional beer, and I am hoping that is the difference maker that will allow me to outlive my parents average length of life of 62.5 years.

This has been on my mind over the past couple of years, and it has definitely been influencing life decisions. As an example, I had a very good friend reach out to my wife and I recently and invite our family to join hers on a cruise in 2022.

As you all know, taking a vacation away from your farm is difficult enough, but this cruise leaves out of Miami and lasts for seven days. In the lower 48 you cannot get further from Kuna, Idaho then Miami, Florida. So, in and of itself this will be a difficult vacation for us to go on.

In addition to that, Autumm and I ruled out cruises as vacations years ago. We went on one together in 2006 to the “Mexican Riviera”. I really enjoyed it, she did not. It was the second cruise that each of us had ever gone on, and we decided that we would look at other vacations options in our life.

However, in light of my thinking about life and the fact that we all have an “off button” that God can press at any time I went to Autumm and asked her to make an exception and go on this cruise. The me of 5 years ago might have passed on this opportunity, thinking we will have time to spend with these friends at some other time in the future. However, the me of today doesn’t take that for granted and realizes that getting to spend that much time visiting and catching up with close friends is a rare gift, and knew that this was an opportunity that might not come again.

Worse yet, it was the type of opportunity that I could see myself looking back on as an elderly or terminally ill person and wishing that I had done. I made up my mind to not have this particular regret when I reached one of those two stages of life.

Back to my friend who now has the issue with his vision, he has always eaten better than me, exercised more and stayed more trim. Yet, he has had an abundance of health issues that have limited his ability to do the things that we used to love doing together, like playing sports and hiking. I don’t live as hard of a lifestyle as my parents, but I definitely could eat better, exercise more regularly and cut out the diet sodas. So, on one hand my decisions are being impacted by my parent’s early deaths and on the other I know how fortunate I am when I see what my friend has been going through and how it has limited his life.

I do quite a bit of my computer work at a coffee shop called the Latte’ Da in Kuna. There is something about the hustle and bustle and background noise that helps me to focus better than if I were sitting in my quiet studio at my house. So this morning I got all the irrigation set, did a bit of feeding and gave bottles to our four kids who are still on the bottle. Then I fed the dogs and cats, took a shower and hopped on my motorcycle and rode into town. Finally the weather is getting nice enough for regular riding!

When I got to the coffee shop I looked around and saw a number of people who, for one reason or another, were able to spend some leisure moments there there this morning. Some looked like they might be retired, others might work weekends and have Mondays off and maybe some were like me and were entrepreneurs. It is interesting to be an observer of this community that I call home as it transitions. You have all heard me talk about the growth and loss of farms here as Kuna transforms from a farming community to a bedroom community for Boise. If you come into town at around 7am on a weekday, especially in Winter when it is still dark, you see nothing but headlights on all the main roads in Kuna. They are all headed one direction, and that is north – towards Boise.

As soon as that morning commute is over, Kuna changes back to a small town. The bulk of the population has left and gone to work in Boise, traffic reduces and the folks who are left either have the day off or don’t have to fight that commute for their jobs. Either way, those of us who get to live and work in Kuna lead a much different life, and I always feel lucky to get to stay out here during the day.

I was looking around the coffee shop this morning and observing these “non-commuters” that inspired this episode. I don’t know the real story of all of these people’s lives, but I know mine. And thinking about mine, makes me think about yours.

This June will make 8 years since I walked away from my career as a police officer so that I could stay out here and be done with what’s in “there”. That was the right decision for me. Back then, having more time with my daughter before she was grown up and out of the house was the main reason for this decision. That was long before I ever even thought about starting a podcast. Today, my perspective has broadened, mostly because of being able to talk to all of you every week.

I want you all to live your best life with however much time you have left and however much physical health you have left. Hopefully, all of you have multiple decades of life and quality of life left. But again, there is that divine “off-button”. I look around and see people my age with cancer and people who are supposed to be just starting their “golden years” getting diagnosed with terminal cancer for no apparent reason.

When you see something like that, you can’t help but wonder why them and why not me. That is totally natural. It is actually a mild form of what people in the military and law enforcement know as “survivor’s guilt”. When it is not you who doesn’t get killed or doesn’t get sick or doesn’t get killed in the traffic accident, you wonder “why not me”?

In the climactic scene of Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks tell Matt Damon to “earn this”. Except for one soldier, Tom Hank’s complete company of about 8 men, are killed trying to save Private Ryan. He is saved, and as Tom Hank’s character is dying he tells him to “earn this”. Talk about the ultimate version of survivor’s guilt.

At the end of the movie you see a man, broken down, begging his wife to tell him that he lived a good life. Ultimately, he is coping with the survivor’s guilt and he realizes that it can only be assuaged by the knowledge that he didn’t take one day for granted.

When I am on that cruise in 2022, I am going to smile everyday. Not because of the decadence or the tropical location or the beautiful sites, but because I am going to value that time with my good friends so much and not take one day for granted.

When I decided to start this show, and I tried to figure out how to build this as a business there was a lot of advice out there on the internet. People in this space instructed me to define my “avatar”. What they meant was to define my ideal listener so I would know who I was talking to when I made these shows.

This idea of my “avatar” is still fuzzy to me. Doing a show like this for seven years will make that more fuzzy because I hear from so many of you, and none of you are exactly what I had pictured. Really, how could you be?

But when I make an episode like this, I find myself speaking to me. The me that I was in 2010 before we bought our farm, before I started a business and when I thought that the life I am living now was only possible for other people. Back then, I had a dream of the lifestyle that I am living now, but I didn’t dare allow myself to think of it. It would make me depressed because I couldn’t find a way to make it happen.

Looking back, it seems so simple, but I know that it is not. Today, I am speaking to all of you who are in the position that I was in, back in 2010. There is a different way to live, and I want to be the person who shows you that it is possible. For those of us in this audience, this dream involves farming and staying out of the city.

There are a myriad of people in this world who live in ways that nobody in the main stream are ever going to tell you are possible. If somebody in your sphere of influence coming up through high school or in college told you that you could live differently than 99% of our population count yourself as very lucky and remember what they told you. Most of us only hear about one path – get an education, get a job, buy a house and retire at age 65 with retirement being defined as the absence of work. However, most of us never are told that we can do something unconventional that fulfills us while still providing us with an income, health insurance, the ability to have a home, etc.

It’s funny, when Autumm and I talk about alternatives to our current work, we each have an example of somebody we saw living unconventionally that is our example of a path that would be interesting to us. I think I should mention here that I love my life. Off-Farm Income is not a bunch of B.S. But I still have moments when I wonder about what I would do under different circumstances or if I could no longer life this way for some reason.

Vacation is where you usually find these people who are living differently. For Autumm, it is a woman that we saw leading an exercise program on the beach in Miami a couple of years ago. I was going to a podcasting conference in Orlando, so the three of us flew to Miami a couple days early. On the beach on day, Autumm, saw a woman, younger than her, leading an exercise class for people who were there on vacation. She talks about doing this all the time.

For spring break this year, Autumm, Hattie and I went to Hawaii for five days. We had to comply with some extra provisions regarding Covid, but because Hawaii was just opening back up we got a really inexpensive trip over there.

I am new to the world of motorcycle riding, but I am hooked. While we were there I rented a motorcycle and I had a day to myself, riding all over the island of Oahu. I rented my motorcycle from a place called “Chase Hawaii Rentals”. They are right in Waikiki, and the three of us walked over there one morning for me to pick up the bike that I had rented.

They are located on a small, corner lot, tucked back off of the main streets of Waikiki, so there was a bit less traffic and noise at their location. There was a guy working there who gave all the riders instructions on the specific bikes and made sure that everything was running correctly.

I rented a Triumph Street Twin from them and had an incredible day. I squeezed every minute out of that rental and returned it right around 5:30 pm that evening. The same guy was still there, inspecting the motorcycles as people returned them. Of course, everyone who was returning them were telling him all about their day and the great rides that they had.

Of course, I did the same, and it turned out that this guy had a brother who lived in Idaho and coached basketball at a high school. We talked about motorcycles, riding in Hawaii and Idaho basketball for a while and then I walked back to the hotel.

This guy found a way to live in paradise, make his living around motorcycles and to participate in what is most likely one of his customer’s best days every, every day! Let me ask you. If you are this guy, you love motorcycles, you love Hawaii and you love helping people have an incredible day, what else do you need? This is the job that I think of, when Autumm and I talk about what we would do, it it were not this.

So, it’s not all about vacations, and I am not suggesting that you are going to find something in which every moment of every day is absolute bliss. However, let me be the voice that tells you that it is possible for you to find a way to live that is going to be unlike anything that anyone you know is doing. Just because they don’t understand it, doesn’t mean that it is not possible.

Let me be the friend who understands what you want and encourages you to pursue it. And let me be the friend who tells you that life is finite, quality of life should not be taken for granted and you should make whatever you are dreaming about happen before the opportunity passes you by and you are left with nothing but regret for not grabbing the opportunity when it was available.

And last, let me be the person to tell you that if hard work with livestock or tractors, out in the weather is your definition of bliss than go for it! There are thousands of weird people in this audience who have the exact same definition of a dream life. Come be weird with the rest of us!

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