08/14/2026
TLDR: Tractors, cold calls, horses and plants, oh my! Lifelong learning at its finest.
It’s hot as blazes today, and I’m down to my last hay bale.
Our tractor is old, tired, and has absolutely no business being as confident as it is on an incline. It scares the everliving bajeezus out of me.
And yet, sometime this morning, it occurred to me how strange it is that I can now casually walk outside, fire up a tractor, scoop up a 1,000-pound round bale, drop it over a fence, and go back inside to work like I didn’t just operate heavy machinery after breakfast.
After a few hours of brutal sales digging, I took a break from the slog of cold outreach to repot a plant because it looked unhappy and I needed some sunlight.
This is apparently my life now.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about all the odd little skills we collect without realizing we’re collecting them.
I recently started working with a local teenager who wants to learn more about caring for horses. I don’t start horses—God bless the people who do—but I’ve always had a knack for the ones people call “problem horses.”
The quirky ones. The ones who are *fine* until you do that one very specific thing in that one very specific way and then suddenly everyone is having a terrible afternoon.
I understand those horses, probably because I, too, am quirky.
I know what it’s like to want something done a certain way and have a perfectly good reason for it, even if that reason isn’t immediately obvious to everyone else. Sometimes it’s sensory. Sometimes it’s logic. Sometimes I’ve already played the situation six moves ahead and spotted a problem that hasn’t happened yet.
Which brings me to another fun fact:
I can see the future.
Sort of.
I’m really good at patterns and puzzles.
Give me enough information and my brain starts running trajectories. If this happens, then probably that. Unless *this* variable changes, in which case we go over here. And if that happens, we have three more possible outcomes.
It’s part trial and error, part common sense, part a reasonably functional understanding of physics and how the universe tends to behave—and part something I can’t really explain.
Intuition, I guess.
I do it with Sudoku all the time.
I’ll stare at a puzzle and think, *That square is a 1.*
Why?
No idea.
It’s just a 1.
Then I’ll work a few more rows, fill in a few more numbers, and eventually uncover the logic that proves what my brain had apparently figured out five minutes earlier.
The older I get, the more I realize I use that same skill everywhere.
With horses.
With people.
With sales.
With products.
With marketing.
I’m constantly looking at what’s happening now and mentally extending the line.
Where does this lead?
What happens if nothing changes?
What happens if *this* changes?
What are we not seeing yet?
It’s probably why I tend to play the long game. I’m comfortable making a bet when I can see several possible paths forward. Not because I know exactly what’s going to happen—I absolutely do not—but because I like leaving myself enough room to change course before a wrong guess becomes a catastrophe.
Maybe that’s what intuition actually is.
Not magic. Not seeing the future.
Just collecting thousands of tiny observations over a lifetime until your brain gets very, very good at whispering:
*Hey. I think I know where this is going.*
And sometimes it’s wrong.
Sometimes it’s right.
And sometimes it tells you that the horse is about to lose its mind, the sales strategy isn’t going to work, or the plant desperately needs a bigger pot.
Today, at least, the plant seems happier.
I’ll take the win.
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**This is actually something I want to start teaching.**
Not Sudoku. And definitely not tractor operation (although I guess I could show you if you really need it!).
How to look at your life a little more like a business: figure out what you’re actually trying to build, take stock of the resources and skills you already have, recognize the patterns that are taking you somewhere you *don’t* want to go, and make small, strategic pivots before you get there.
I’m bringing some of my life-as-a-business coaching online soon. I’m still deciding exactly what shape it will take, but if this way of thinking makes your brain light up a little, stick around.
I can teach you how to do it.
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