See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week:

David Mamet:

“It’s hard to remember that you set out to drain the swamp when you’re up to your ass in alligators.”

The swamp is life. It’s business. It’s relationships. It’s difficulty and challenge.
Alligators are inevitable.

Stay in the fight.

                          In good health,

                             Harvey

See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week:

From Phil Knight, the founder of Nike:

If you bet on people the world has overlooked, they’ll spend their lives proving you right.

Phil was talking about hiring or partnering with people in a business sense.

But I also think his advice applies to day to day human interactions.

If you treat people as if they have been kind to you, they will often work to prove you right.

                          In good health,

                             Harvey

See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week:

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”

From Dale Carnegie

I was thinking about this principle of action the other day and decided to make a video on it, here it is:

                          In good health,

                             Harvey

See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week:

“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now.

For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning.”

— Vincent van Gogh

A farming analogy… nice. Two thoughts:

1. Don’t be insulted by people who judge you for what you are (grass) instead of what you know you will be (wheat). Only YOU know you’re becoming wheat.

2. If you’re going to cast judgement on other people… you may as well see them as an ongoing project (grass) and not a completed project (wheat). Make sense?

                          In good health,

                             Harvey

See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week:

From Hunter S Thompson:

You won’t find reasonable men on the tops of tall mountains

                          In good health,

                             Harvey

Quote of the Week:

Henry David Thoreau on the trap of desire for things:

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.”

                          In good health,

                             Harvey

My standout takeaway was how healthy and well-adapted these cattle are.

This is a tiny island with probably less than 200 cows. I explored the island and saw less than 40. And yet, with such a small genetic pool, these animals are genetically sound and thriving.

Aside from the small genetic pool, there are other factors that on paper should disadvantage these cattle: The climate is hot and humid. Access to medicine is very restricted. The nutritional value of the forage is generally low, with usually zero supplementation. Human intervention is infrequent.

Here’s the irony; it is precisely these limitations that has meant that the fittest and best adapted cattle survive and reproduce, thereby improving the genetic lineage.

The modern cattle breeds that humans have ‘improved’, particularly in the UK and US, have had the aptitude bred out of them, usually for the show-ring or for bragging rights or just plain ignorance.

Mark my words: we have a pandemic of ill-adapted livestock in the modern agricultural world.

We must continually look up to examples of livestock thriving in their natural environment, even if that example is across the atlantic ocean, grazing on a beach.

See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week: From James Clear’s Newsletter

Philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche emphasizes that your life is the accumulated record of your days:

“The history of every day. — What is the history of every day in your case? Look at your habits that constitute it: are they the product of innumerable little cowardices and lazinesses, or of your courage and inventive reason?”

Source: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft

                          In good health,

                             Harvey

See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week:

Arthur Brooks, author and academic, on the Modern Wisdom Podcast #1043, defines the difference between risk and uncertainty.

Risk and uncertainty are different. And people use them interchangeably. Uncertainty means you don’t know what might happen, so you can’t assign probabilities, so you can’t manage contingencies. Risk is that you know what might happen, so you can assign probabilities, so you can manage contingencies. That’s the reason that people feel better when they buy insurance. Insurance is a happiness business. What it does is it converts uncertainty into risk and it no longer becomes a source of misery. That’s why anybody who buys a life insurance policy feels better after they do it because they’ve just turned their uncertainty into risk. Uncertainty is a source of fear.

And that reminds me of this I heard from Alex Hormozi:

‘Fear only exists in the vague, not the specific.’

Because, as Arthur said above, once it is specific, it becomes risk, not uncertainty. And risk is measurable and manageable.

                          In good health,

                             Harvey

See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week:

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” - Blaise Pascal

Surely Mr Pascal cannot mean all of them, can he?

Yes, he does.

Let me dissect some definitions. For my own understanding.

‘All’ = yes, all. Every single one. Yes, and that one that popped into your head.

‘Problems’ = our flaws, our conflicts, our messy parts that we don’t address.

‘Stem’ = the keyword. Pascal is saying that our problems are downstream of the sitting quietly part. It’s not always the sole cause, but always a cause.

‘Inability’ = and/or our unwillingness and reluctance.

‘Quietly’ = without external input, noise or distraction (society).

“Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.”

- Soren Kierkegaard

                          In good health,

                             Harvey

Frosty Weather!

See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week:

“Find something that feels like play to you but feels like work to everybody else.”

- Naval Ravikant

On this…

I meet people every day who could not do my job.

And equally, I could not do theirs.

And he questions why I do my job. And I question why he does his.

There is a fundamental error we all make when evaluating others life choices.

We think ‘what would I do if I were in their shoes?’

But we’re not in their shoes.

Because if we were, we’d understand where they’ve walked: Their upbringing; their programming. Their experiences, tendencies and all the situational nuances that they’re not telling you.

                          In good health,

                             Harvey

Trucks have gotten soft these days…

See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week:

“Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.”

―Alfred Adler

This is too good for me not to expand upon.

“Life happens at the level of events, not of words”

This is a lesson that I feel has been repeatedly hammered into my brain, almost daily, over the past few years.

The principle works on two planes:

• For yourself: Talk Less, Do More.

• For others: Believe their actions, not their words.

I can’t word it better than Alfred, so here it is again:

“Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.”

―Alfred Adler

                          In good health,

                             Harvey

I hope you have had time to spend around your family and loved ones.

Now onto 2026…

Quote of the Week:

"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo.

What I’ve Been Thinking About:

The last few weeks of the year always feel so momentous.

Especially with the pattern interrupt that is the christmas holidays, it is a great period for reflection on the past year and looking ahead to the new year.

Did you set any goals for 2025? If you did, you can reflect on them and adjust them for the new year.

If you didn’t set goals for this year, it is important you set some now for the upcoming year.

Start with just 3 goals:

• Career / Wealth - an income goal? A new job? etc

• Health - a training routine? A completed 10km race?

• Relations - a hobby? A date-night schedule? A family-time goal?

You’re allowed to change these goals. They do not have to be permanent. The important thing is the setting of the goal.

In good health,

Harvey

1. an educational visit to a farm, learning about regenerative beef production

2. some much welcome sun in the cow barn

3. some fence - removal action!

See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week:

The man who says it cannot be done should not interrupt that man who is doing it.

A chinese proverb (apparently)

What I’ve Been Thinking About:

We lose a species to extinction approximately every 20 minutes.

I heard this a few weeks ago and I can’t stop thinking about it. 3 species per hour. Gone. Extinct. Not just rare, not just struggling… extinct. Gone for good!

At surface level, this doesn’t really matter. So the very last lesser-spotted indian swamp frog died? No big deal…

But it is the scale that’s the problem. The compounding effect of biodiversity loss. When we lose one species, we lose a predator for another and a prey for yet another, causing population imbalances.

Mass biodiversity loss, I believe, is arguably the biggest problem facing our earth currently.

In good health,

Harvey

See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week:

Paul Graham, in his essay The Shortness of Life, famously advised us to:

“Ruthlessly prune b.s., don’t wait to do things that matter, and savour the time you have.”

What I’ve Been Thinking About:

How can you know if you are doing the right thing?

Truly we do not know. We do not know the consequences of our actions until an amount of time has passed.

For some decisions, 24 hours is all that is needed to know if we did the right thing (eg, ‘should I have had that fifth scotch-on-the-rocks?’).

But for some things, we may not even know in our lifetime; it will be for a future generation to look back and judge us. You know, big existential things like ‘did my work contribute to humanity?’ (Scary, I know).

We only ever know with the benefit of hindsight. So, in the moment, we must take an educated guess.

Here’s 3 ways to take a (more) educated guess of what to do:

1. What is my intuition telling me?

2. How has this worked out in the past for me?

3. How has this worked out in the past for others?

Notice I haven’t stopped using the word ‘guess’. It’s still a guess. It’s all a guess. The important thing is that you take a guess.

No decision is worse than a bad decision.

In good health,

Harvey

See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week:

The key to being fearless is having nothing to lose. And the only way to have nothing to lose is to realize nothing in the world belonged to you to begin with. - Alex Hormozi.

Its an excellent frame, and prompted my thought below:

What I’ve Been Thinking About:

Entitlement is quite a paradox.

We must believe that we are inherently valuable as a human being and that we deserve freedom, love, wealth, rewards.

And…

That nothing on this earth is yours, it never was and never will be. We ‘blaze in the sky’ (as Steve Jobs put it) for such a short period of time, leaving only memories and owning only temporary experiences.

I think of it this way: Life is borrowed. People say ‘borrowed time’ for terminally ill people, but the truth is we all have a terminal condition; it’s called life. We arrive with nothing and we will leave through the same door.

In good health,

Harvey

See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week:

“Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the things you did.” ~ Mark Twain

What I’ve Been Thinking About:

Reading books changed my life.

Recently I have noticed that I credit myself for changing my life.

A crafty trick of the ego.

The credit belongs to the authors whose words, thoughts and advice I took in.

In good health,

Harvey

See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week:

“Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.”

— Glennon Doyle

What I’ve Been Thinking About:

Time.

We say that we ‘spend’ time.

As if it’s money in a purse.

But truly, it is not ours to ‘spend’. Time will go by whether we intentionally spend it or not. The sun will rise and set everyday and will not give a hoot whether you have been productive, busy, social or if you have instead vegetated on the sofa for 12 hours.

What we mean by ‘spending time’ is actually just us channelling our attention.

Picture a flowing stream; we may channel the water’s direction by dropping stones, but the flow will persist.

Our job, then, is to drop stones in intentional places. To guide the flow of our time along a route that seems meaningful and beautiful to us.

“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.”
― Benjamin Franklin

In good health,

Harvey

See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week:

Remove “problem” from your vocabulary and replace it with “puzzle” ~ George Mack

What I’m Thinking About:

I find that the first step to making progress is defining what progress would look like.

It is all too easy to dive into a project or task with a flurry of action and ‘doing’. Because doing feels good. It scratches the itch we have to be busy for the sake of being busy.

But the danger is that any progress feels better than no progress; so we give ourselves a pat on the back, followed by a (seemingly) well deserved reward or rest.

What’s not accounted for is efficiency.

Clever, economics-y people would measure efficiency by the ratio of ‘useful output to total input’.

Useful output to total input. What real, valuable progress was made and how much time, energy and resources did it take to make it?

In other words, was it worth it? Or was I just ‘doing’ for the sake of doing? Was I briefly quelling my existential anxiety and feelings of insufficiency?

We must define what we want progress (aka ‘outputs’) to look like. By taking the time to define the goal initially, we not only become more efficient but also gain clarity over our true goals, sidestepping the allure of mere busyness and potentially even subconscious self-sabotage.

In good health,

Harvey

Life on the Farm

See more on my youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@TheBeefFedFarmer

Quote of the Week

““We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?” ~ Jean Cocteau

My opinion: We hate to admit it, but the success of those we don’t like means that they are better than us at something. That means we have room for improvement.

… (but don’t rule out embezzlement, cheating, exploit & fraud!)

A Thought From Me

It is not your job to make another aware of their ego by prodding and testing it.

Pushing someone’s limits and making them aware of their triggers can feel like an act of service, honourable even.

But it is not. When we do this, we are only stroking our own ego, not servicing theirs.

Rather, be happy to participate in their game, with their rules.

This is not about being a pushover or a ‘suck-up’.

You may be in their game, with their rules, but you will remain your own player.

In good health,

Harvey