One of my favorite movies growing up was City Slickers, with Billy Chrystal. As a wee one I wanted to be a cowboy. My old man would set up me with Roy Rogers VHS tapes. That was my first real hero as a kid. I’d dress up like him, handkerchief around the neck, cowboy hat with my old man’s boots. I’d wear the uniform to McDonald’s, which, if we were willing to drive 15 minutes, would be a cowboy themed McDonald’s.
As I aged the cowboy infatuation subsided. I became more interested in sports than anything else. Then women took the top place of interests.
I was raised close to a city, and being from just outside of the city in an area surrounded by farms, the city is what interested me most. Going through high school and college I was always heading into town. After college, starting a business and so forth, I traveled to New York a fair bit, and Rome and other metropolis’.
Eventually, I moved into the heart of the city. As city life became my life, my values reflected this. What I wore and owned became who I was and the focus of my pursuit.
Aesthetics and image is everything in a city. Your value is determined by others, and they measure you based on your education, your income, what you own, what you wear, what you look like, but not on what you do.
That’s the main difference between the country and the city. In the country it’s what you do that matters.
City jobs are dominated by a lack of physical production. Unless you’re a mechanic or a plumber or in construction, you likely work at a job where you don’t actually produce anything. The result of your work isn’t something tangible. So it makes sense that you’re not measured on what you actually produce.
In the country, in the lives of those cowboys I looked up to as a kid, there was something tangible that came from your work. There’s a physical resistance to you completing your job.
What’s valued isn’t what you wear or the degree on your wall, but what you do.
Stop thinking like a city slicker.
Stop thinking that your clothes or your degree or your car holds any true value. They don’t. What you do is who you are and your worth. So, do something. Do something of value. Fix things, help others fix things, produce something that benefits others and you’ll be paid for it.
Betting on a stock isn’t producing something. Selling something isn’t producing something. They can be your job, how you earn a living, by all means, become great at them, but to feel as though you’re serving a real purpose you need to produce, you need to create, and the more tangible the creation, the more value you’ll gain from it.
This is the value in fixing your own problems. This is why you should learn to fix your own vehicle, even change your own oil. This is why, when a problem arises in your home, you fix it, rather than calling someone else to do it.
We’ve lost the tangible value that was once all there was.
Every line of work involved some form of production. Now, we put work that doesn’t produce anything ahead of work that does in terms of importance.
Teaching doesn’t produce anything tangible. Working online – unless you’re writing books – doesn’t, either. As men, we need the tangible. You may not make money from it, but a hobby like carpentry or hunting or fishing are necessary, not for the bank account, but for the soul.
About The Author
Chad Howse: Chad’s mission is to get you in the arena, ‘marred by the dust and sweat and blood’, to help you set and achieve audacious goals in the face of fear, and not only build your ideal body, but the life you were meant to live.
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Valuable article. Anyone who doubts it should really try it. Go and spend six months as a labourer and see tangibles. It’s truly meat for the soul. The pride of a hard days work speaks volumes.