“Do what you love and you will never work a day in your life”
The barn is still my favorite project of all time
The oft-repeated quote originally attributed to Confucius is one of my all-time favorites – for no other reason than it holds so much truth.
It was that very topic of “doing what we love” that the was the focus of our conversation last week with Anna Rumer – a reporter for the Zanesville Time Recorder in Zanesville, Ohio. Anna had contacted us about writing a local piece on our farm and website after reading about OWG through a national feature on the Hometalk website. You can see both stories here : Zanesville Time Recorder’s story “Local Farm Teaches Sustainability and Simplicity With Blog” and Hometalk’s Behind The Screen – The Old World Garden Farm Story
In short – she wanted to know how we found time to do it, and why. The simple answer of course was the same one we have repeated since starting this project: “You make and find time for what you love to do”.
You make time for what you love- and we both love home-grown food!
I can honestly say that I don’t think either of us have ever considered building the farm “work”. In fact, when we look back at probably our three biggest projects at the farm – the building of the barn, the chicken coop and the setting up of our gardens – it was all about doing what we love to do.
See:
Building a Barn When You Have – A Barn Raising In Photos
Setting Up The Garden And Our Food Sources
We had fun during every one of those projects – and always looked forward to what would come next – and still do.
The chicken coop project is another of our favorites
OK, so yes, there were nights of soreness, quite a few minor injuries, blisters and the inability to figure out which muscle you had really strained – but again – it’s not work when you are having fun and doing what you love.
The key is when you are “working” at something you love – you are too busy having fun to think about it as work. And when you add in two final key components – the ability to never take yourselves too seriously, and the ability to accept set-backs and small failures as part of the experience – then no matter what – it all becomes good.
Learning to laugh at yourself is a must – like the colossal failure of my attempt to build a silo – it looked really cool for awhile! 🙂
We don’t expect our projects, our garden, or life to be perfect 100 percent of the time. The garden will have times when it certainly doesn’t look “perfect”. Crops will fail – weeds will grow, chickens will escape, shovels will break and trees will sometimes die. We have plenty of failures and even more “we can do better next years”.
The same goes for the website. At this point, we take a few hours a week to sit down and answer as many comments and questions from followers as we can – knowing it would be virtually impossible to answer each one. We never thought the site would grow the way it has – but we write our recipes, DIY projects and gardening articles from what we know and love – and try to keep it simple. The same will go for the book that we have now started to write – it’s a must to keep it fun.
Our reclaimed barn table made from old barn timbers – this project left a few splinters .
So, at the end of the day – we always know three things that keep the smiles and laughter going through anything: that we love what we do, we are going to keep it fun, and we will never stop working at the dream. The best part of it all – no matter what your dream – it works! Here is to simple, happy living!
Jim and Mary – Old World Garden Farms
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