Tools to Win

My garden is a teacher. I have become convinced that all of life’s lessons can be learned or understood in a garden. (Okay, some are learned on a baseball field too.)

Most recently, we have been harvesting corn. God blessed our corn crop this year beyond our expectations.  We pull it from the stalk, chop off both ends, pull the husks, remove the silks, cut the kernels from the cob, blanch it in water to kill the enzymes, cool it, and bag it up for the freezer. It’s time-consuming and labor-intensive. We don’t particularly love the effort but we definitely enjoy having the corn all year long. The process hasn’t changed much over a very long time.

We had heard that allowing the huskless ears to stand in cold water would make removing the silks easier. Like everything else “they say,” we cast a skeptical eye on it.
Then came the evening that we knew we would not be able to complete a whole cycle of the process with the ears we had picked. So we packed them in an ice chest and buried them under the contents of two bags of ice.

Wonder of wonders, the next afternoon as I began to remove the silks from the ice-cold ears, I found them decidedly more cooperative. All of a sudden, I became a believer in something we’ve always heard “they say” to be true.

Something else happened that afternoon, though. My tolerance for remaining silks left on the ears dropped to near zero. I now had a process that made better results easier to achieve.

I work with some amazing people. Some are very creative; some are detail-oriented; some have incredible technical skills; some are visionaries. Every one of them would look at yesterday’s great results as mere mediocrity if a new tool enabled them to raise the bar on themselves.

Read that last phrase again, I promise you it’s true. We will raise the bar on ourselves as skills improve, as tools improve, as processes improve.

It’s what we do.