Episode 40: Sometimes It's Faster to Use a Shovel

In my line of work, people hire us to find things [00:00:30] underground. And that being said, we come into contact with a lot of people that move dirt around for a living. In our modern era, most of that digging. Every once in a while, I'll come across a few guys that are waiting for an excavator to show up so they can start digging.

Most of the time, these guys carry shovels in their trucks. In fact, almost always. I've seen guys waiting over an hour for an excavator to arrive when they only needed to dig three [00:01:00] feet down. To be fair, there are times when the dirt is so hard that you really do need an excavator to dig three feet down.

But that's an exception. Thanks again. A man with a shovel can do remarkable amounts of digging in an hour's time. If they happen to be fit, they can dig a three foot hole in almost no time. Excavators are faster, they're easier, but they're also high maintenance, and they're big and clunky and they break all the time, and if they're not on the [00:01:30] job with you when you need them, then they're of no use whatsoever.

I know why those guys wait for the excavator. It's easier to sit around and do nothing for a little bit than to dig a hole. Most of them are being paid by the hour anyway, so why bother rushing it? I've been thinking about this because I, like some of these laborers that I sometimes see, also avoid doing things I could be doing when I think that there might be a faster way to do it.

The problem is, I may know a faster way to do [00:02:00] something, but I I don't always know how to or have the means to use that solution. Sometimes it would just be faster to dig with a shovel. In the context of my work, there are a lot of things I do not know how to do yet. I think that's the plight of almost all businesses.

If they knew how to make a trillion dollars, then theoretically they would. At least you think they would. But the truth is we usually know how to do a lot more [00:02:30] than we actually act upon. If I really wanted to increase my company's sales, I would dedicate almost all of my time to that task. I would knock on every door and call every contact I have.

I would reach out to anyone and everyone that may possibly use our services. It might be inefficient, and it might be tough, but if I did it enough, I would be all but guaranteed success. I don't do this though. Maybe I just don't care enough. In truth, I think that may partly be the [00:03:00] culprit. I'm happy to grow more slowly, but that isn't really the biggest issue.

I resist wasting time because I know how inefficient a sales blitz like that would be. It would be like digging with a shovel when I know there's an excavator out there somewhere. The problem is that I don't own an excavator, so I need to use a shovel. And the cool thing about using a shovel in this metaphor is that the shovel can eventually [00:03:30] transform itself into an excavator.

If I were to make a thousand calls a week for a year, for example, I would become an incredible sales machine at the end of that year. I would know more about my customers and potential customers than anyone else would. And I would be far more effective at selling to these companies. But you have to put in the reps if you want to get to that level.

Even if you never managed to upgrade to that [00:04:00] excavator, a shovel is still a pretty incredible tool. I've seen teams of men that exclusively use shovels. They're incredible. The speed that these guys can dig is shocking. It's kind of like that story about John Henry, if you remember it, who competed against a drilling machine to dig a railroad tunnel and actually won.

Well, sometimes a few dudes with a shovel really are faster than an excavator. So I just bought [00:04:30] podcast on because I assume that if I wanted better looking video, I needed a better camera. Well, now that I own this expensive tool, I'm putting in some effort to learn how to use it. And the thing that eats me now is that the more I have learned about using this tool, the more I have learned how easily I could have gotten away with using my phone camera.

I was tempted into buying the shiny toy before I took the time to [00:05:00] really learn how to use my figurative shovel. I think the question worth considering for all of us is, what would you like to achieve in life, and what tools do you currently have available to help you get there? If a kid wants to be a basketball star, but only owns a soccer ball, He can make serious gains by shooting a soccer ball into a basket.

Some of the greatest soccer players that have ever played started off kicking around whatever they could find in the streets. [00:05:30] If you want to learn an instrument, but can't afford one, a person could always start singing. Any knowledge within the realm that you're interested in is going to make learning other elements in that area significantly easier.

People that really love making music are are usually able to pick up new instruments with no problem because they've already learned on another instrument and they've got that breadth of musical knowledge. If you aspire to be a [00:06:00] billionaire but don't have the funds to launch the business that you envisioned, you can start with something smaller.

A guy that chooses to start mowing lawns with a machete It's going to learn a whole lot more about business than the person that opted not to do anything at all. And by the way, I have actually seen some incredibly efficient lawn mowing by people with machetes when I lived abroad. What is it you want?

And what do you have to do to get there? [00:06:30] If you can afford a better tool, then that's great. But if you can't, then just keep moving forward. It's not the tools that make us great at a thing, but it's rather how we use those tools. We can now travel across the world in less than a day due to airplanes. The early explorers took months to get from one part of the globe to another, with no GPS and no engines, just a wooden boat with a large piece of fabric attached to it.

Just like us, they reached [00:07:00] their destinations. And you might even say that they reached their destinations faster than they would have by plane because they chose to use what they had instead of waiting for the modern airplane to be invented. If we really want to accomplish something, sometimes it's faster just to use a shovel.