“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the cornfield.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
“That’s why I did so much cipherin’ before we came out here!”
– Dick Heston, who left this world for a better one almost 13 years ago
No matter how good our plans are, they’ve got to be connected to the field. Where things actually happen.
President Eisenhower understood (probably because he was a top military leader), and so did Dad (probably because he was a farmer!) that you could plan all you wanted to, but your plan had better have close connections to the field, and better darn sure have some flexibility built in. Dad “ciphered” a lot, channeling, tongue-in-cheek, his inner Jethro Bodine. The cipherin’ almost always took place on a First National Bank note pad, with a mechanical pencil. In later years, the ciphering got done on a little pocket calendar that we got him every year for Christmas…and he’d pull those notes out of his shirt pocket out in the field.
That’s another consideration. If our plan won’t fit in our shirt pocket, or easily in to the memory of the people closest to the execution of the plan, it might be over-baked.
Do a little cipherin’ along the way, pop those notes in our shirt pockets and then and get out in the field, and make something incredible happen today!Pla
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