There are a handful of days you spend the rest of your life measuring against. The day I spent with Joel Salatin in the Shenandoah Valley is one of mine.
I had been reading him for years before I ever shook his hand. Back when I was serious about getting into ranching here in the States, I had a whole vision burning in me: regenerative agriculture, cattle finished on grass the way God designed them to eat, beef sold straight from the land to the family that would cook it. And the most famous voice in America for all of that, the man who had said it loudest and lived it longest, was Joel Salatin. I read his books. I drove to hear him speak more than once. Somewhere along the way he quietly became one of my heroes.
A few years ago he fell out of favor with certain people. It didnât surprise me, and it didnât change a thing for me. The men worth listening to are almost always the men who eventually say something the crowd doesnât want said. So when I decided I wanted to learn from him directly, not from a stage but face to face, I reached out. We agreed on a fair day rate, and a few weeks later I left Austin and pointed myself toward Virginia.
It remains one of the most impressive days of my life.
He talked. I listened. That was the arrangement, more or less, and it was exactly what I had come for. We walked the land. We talked about cattle and chickens and grass and soil and the lunacy of the modern food system. But the conversation that has stayed lodged in me all this time was not about farming at all. Not really.
The young man who quit
I told him about a blog post I had read. A young farmer had walked away from his job seven years earlier to chase the same dream I was chasing. Seven years of grinding. Seven years of early mornings and broken equipment and thin margins and aching shoulders. And at the end of it, with apparently nothing to show, he had decided he was done. He was giving up on farming.
Joelâs reaction was priceless.
He looked at me and said, âWhat? After just seven years? You canât give up after seven years. When I think back on my own life, Teresa and I had nothing figured out after seven years.â
And I am quite sure he didnât only mean farming. I think he also meant being married.
Seven years sounds long. It isnât.
That line has worked on me ever since, the way a good thought does, slowly, like water finding its way through stone.
Because to most people, seven years sounds like an eternity. Seven years is long enough to feel entitled to an answer. Long enough to feel that if it hasnât worked by now, it never will. No wonder couples who havenât figured each other out after seven years quietly conclude they never will, and divorce. No wonder a farmer calls it after seven harvests. And I will be honest with you: I have sat across from clients who poured years into a venture, and I have told them plainly to stop, to cut their losses, to stop pouring good money and good life after a thing that was never going to come good.
So yes, there is a point where you have backed the wrong horse, where loyalty becomes stubbornness and persistence becomes self-harm. Knowing the difference is part of wisdom. I wonât pretend otherwise.
But here is the harder truth, the one our age does not want to hear: far more often, we give up far too early.
In marriages. In businesses. In whole countries we abandon the moment they stop being comfortable.
We forget what we actually are. We are creatures of habit, slow animals, formed by repetition and time. We need years to settle into a place, into a craft, into another human being. Years to acclimatize. Years to stop being two strangers sharing a roof and become something that actually fits. The first seven years are not the verdict. The first seven years are barely the introduction.
And so much of life simply takes a long time to figure out. I can say that about YouTube, where everything I tried felt like shouting into a void until, one day, it didnât. I can say it about every business I have built. And I can certainly say it about relationships, the most patient project of all.
Why we make the promise in public
This is where willpower comes in. Dedication. The refusal to bolt at the first cold stretch.
And in marriage, this is the whole reason we make that promise out loud, in front of everyone we know. Think about it. Why drag your family and friends and your whole community into a vow between two people? Because somewhere we have always known it would be hard. We knew there would be a night, or a season, or a whole year, when the easy thing and the right thing point in opposite directions. So we built ourselves a memory on purpose. We stood up in public and said the words while everyone watched, precisely so that on the hard day we would remember that solemn moment, and feel the weight of all those witnesses, and stay.
That is not a relic. That is engineering for human weakness. And it is wise.
Enduring is not enough
But here is the second lesson, and it is the one most people miss.
Just enduring, gritting your teeth and white-knuckling your way through, passively waiting for it to get better, is not enough. Not in marriage. Not in business. Endurance alone curdles into resentment, and resentment is its own slow divorce.
You have to keep the thing alive.
In business that means you never stop innovating. You try the new marketing avenue. You rebuild the offer. You refuse to let the venture calcify just because it survived another year. Survival is not the goal. Aliveness is.
And in marriage it is exactly the same. You make the effort to keep it fresh. You embrace the person fully, the actual person in front of you, and you stop hunting, even in the quiet of your own mind, for the exits. There are no honest escape routes from a vow, only dishonest ones. Secretly scrolling for something on your phone late at night is not harmless and it is not nothing. It is the adultery of the heart that Jesus warned about, the betrayal that happens long before any door is ever opened. The marriage you are trying to save is the one you are quietly cheating on in the dark.
You donât get to coast. Nobody told us that, but itâs true. Every single day you start again. In the field, in the office, in the marriage bed. The work of yesterday is honored and then set down, and you begin once more, fresh, as if the soil were new.
The long patience pays
I never found out what became of that young farmer who walked away after seven years. Maybe he found a better road. I genuinely hope he did. But I doubt the next thing came any faster, because nothing worth having ever does.
What I do know, from my own life, from my clients, and from the man himself standing in his own pasture, is that the people who stay, who keep the thing alive, who give it the years it actually needs, are almost always the ones who win in the end.
I have stuck with the wrong things too long. Iâll own that. But every single venture of mine that finally flourished was a brutal struggle first. Every one of them took years to bloom. Not one of them announced itself early. They all looked, for a long and discouraging stretch, exactly like failures.
That, in the end, is the whole secret of regenerative agriculture, and it is no accident that it became the parable for the rest of my life. You cannot force rich soil in a season. There is no chemical shortcut that doesnât cost you later. You build it slowly, year over year, by working with time instead of against it. You feed the ground, and you wait, and you keep showing up, and one day you realize that what was barren is now alive and feeding everything that stands on it.
A business is soil. A marriage is soil. A life is soil.
Itâs a hard sell, this gospel of patience, in a world addicted to the quick exit. But it is worth it. After just seven years, you have barely begun.
So stay. Keep it fresh. Start again tomorrow.
And give it more than seven years.
