CHAPTER 1
The Value of Knowing What NOT to Do

Experience is knowing what not to do and knowing when not to do it.

—Dennis Coates

Experience is the best teacher anyone will ever have. Pain is one of the best educators any person has ever met. Think about it for a second. Remember the first time you touched something hot? It probably only took once for you to learn, “If the pan is hot; I should not touch it.” Odds are, if you're like me, you were a smart‐ass kid who looked your parents directly in the face as they told you, “Don't touch that; it's hot.” And what did you and I do? We reached out with smug smiles and grabbed that hot pan. And immediately, the lesson became exponentially evident: We should listen. In the half‐second it took for the electric signal to travel from our fingertips up our arm, across our chest, up through our neck, and into our tiny childish brains, we were made aware of the truth that our parents weren't lying to us and that the pan was indeed hot. We were learning in real time that we should not do things that would cause us harm, and we were being educated to trust that those older and more experienced than us were warning us for a very good reason.

Unfortunately for me, I am hardheaded. Although I learned from the hot‐pan problem the first time, it would take a potentially life‐threatening event for me to learn that I should not ignore the cautions of those who know what they are doing and have the life experience to justify their cautions.

I'm from Texas. I grew up on a farm. Well, a ranch. The nearest town has a whopping population of fewer than 400 people, and I graduated high school with a massive class of 51 students other than myself. In our school, everyone played all the sports, and everyone had to be engaged in every after‐school activity simply because there weren't enough people to fill a bus to attend any events. For the district to pay for the gas for us to have an educational program after school, everyone participated whether we liked it or not. It was a town with only three streets and no stoplights. The firefighters operated out of a barn, and in the fall, you were allowed to bring your shotgun to school to go dove hunting in the afternoons. It was as Texas as it comes.

I still love to go home and be with my family on the farm, and I honestly think that's one of the places where I learned some of my most valuable lessons about what not to do and when to listen to people who know what the hell is going on. When you live on a ranch, ultimately, you will have to work the cattle. What does this mean for all you city slickers? Well, it means eventually, you're going to take the herd, no matter how large it is, and get it into a corral and begin to give the cattle all the medications, vaccinations, and treatments they need to stay healthy. The money generated from the sale of those animals feeds your family, and you have no choice but to make sure they are as healthy as possible so they can get to market.

A rite of passage for most Texas boys is finally getting to work the herd with their father. And just like every other kid in my small town, I couldn't wait for the day I got to work the herd with dad. You had to be physically large enough to be helpful, so you couldn't work the cows until you got to be at least 10 or 11. Luckily, I was a big kid. The first time I did this, I was about 11 years old, and I was tall enough that dad was ready to have me help him work the herd. In Texas, you do this in the spring when the weather goes from cool in the morning to boiling hot in the afternoon. You get sunburned, the air smells like shit and burnt leather, and the experience is genuinely unpleasant. Working the herd is nothing like the romantic scenes you've seen in movies like Lonesome Dove or the TV show Yellowstone. But it's something that every Texas boy who has access to a ranch and animals wants to do.

The first time I went to the annual roundup, cowboy hat in hand, ready to help dad and other ranchers work on the cows and prepare the herd for the next year, I was excited. I was unafraid, and I was ready to show them that I was a young man and could help do these things, just like the rest of the cowboys. Like every other time before when I had watched from afar, things seemed normal. The herd was driven into the corral, the animals were lined up, and we got ready to begin with the yearlings (cows between one and two years old) at the front of the line for processing. Some cows get big fast and can easily be north of 350 pounds in their first year, but the yearlings are “manageable” as they are smaller.

While these animals look like big, slow, lumbering oafs, they are not. When you take a few thousand pounds of beef and throw it into a corral, and the herd gets the idea that something is going wrong—they can hear the moans and bellows of their fellow cows as they are being treated, injected, and stuck with a variety of sharp metal objects—their stress levels go through the roof. The yearlings are exceptionally prone to this stress and will do anything to find a way to get out of that corral as fast as possible. (Keep this in mind.) My job as the low man on the totem pole but also the largest kid in the corral was to help push the yearlings up through the corral into a narrow channel or chute that would ultimately bring them in front of the real cowboys who would treat each yearling as it emerged. Sounds simple enough, right?

On my first go‐round, I got behind a group of a few yearlings, started whooping and hollering like all the other cowboys, and watched as the herd began to move up into the chute. All was well. “This work is alright; I could do this all day long,” I thought to myself. And then the situation began to change. Fast. About the third yearling in line figured out that things were not going to go well for it when it got to the end of the chute. The yearling decided unexpectedly to do a complete 180 and come back out at full speed, directly toward me. If you've never been in a position where a mass of beef is running at you as fast as possible and you have nowhere to go, it's a terrifying experience. Being a young man and typically doing things like reacting rather than thinking, I did what any self‐preserving human would do and jumped toward the nearest fence as 500 pounds of beef rocketed past me.

It was probably one of the fastest moves I have ever made in this life, but that quick move resulted in removing the only barrier between the rest of the yearlings and their freedom. In seconds, they discovered they could backtrack out of that chute, and they rushed me in a wave of hoofs and muscle that my young mind could barely comprehend. Before I could turn around to face the chute again, the yearlings knocked me over, trampled me, and kicked me in the face as they vaulted out of the chute. As I've said, I have a hard head, and nothing other than my pride got seriously hurt. But now I had to push the same animals back into this chute.

The problem was that while cows are simple, they aren't stupid, and now they were aware that they had the power and ability to backtrack out of that uncomfortable place at will. Effectively, the beef was now in charge of the situation and process. So, for the next 8 or 10 hours, one by one, I had to grab a yearling, physically shove it into the chute, and then hold it in position until the cowboys were ready to process it. Our herd at that time was a few hundred cows, which also meant there were a few hundred yearlings, so my friend Gary Lee and I spent the entirety of that day and the next two days getting our asses kicked, stomped on, and shat on simply because I had not stood my ground with the first yearlings I faced.

Where does knowing what not to do come into this conversation? Why am I telling you a story about some redneck kid doing rancher stuff in a book about leadership? Before this engagement, we had a cowboy named Sidney who had been doing cowboy things his entire life. He had the craggy hands, leather skin, and scraggly beard of a man who had spent a lifetime doing hard, physical work. Sidney could easily have been an extra on Yellowstone. In the days before we began to move the herd into the corral, Sidney tried to advise me never to back up, knowing that I would be the low man on the totem pole who would push the yearlings into the chute. With a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a bullwhip in his hand, already three beers deep on the morning before that day in the corral, he looked me dead in the face and said, “Never back up, because if you do, they're going to know they can lick you. They'll figure it out quick, boy. And you're going to spend the rest of your time doing these one by one. And you will get your ass stomped.”

I acknowledged Sidney's words smugly, but I did not heed them. I smiled at him and tipped my hat like any good cowboy would do, but his words passed through my ears like a Taco Bell burrito moving through a freshman's colon. Someone who had the experience and knew the issues I was about to face had told me what not to do: “Do not give those animals an inch. Do not back up. Above all, keep the yearlings with their heads facing forward, and keep pressure on them so they won't move anywhere but where we want them to go.” Had I done those things, I would not have spent three days straight moving animals one by one into and out of the chute in the blazing Texas heat.

But what does that lesson have to do...