Don’t Quit Yet: Chinese Farmer Parable

[00:00:00] Being under the dirt, can either be the end of life or it can be the beginning when life keeps throwing dirt in your face. It’s very hard to tell sometimes. Am I being buried or am I being planted? In today’s podcast, I wanna share a story that reveals a powerful way of thinking, what I’m calling the maybe mindset method.

And then I’m gonna walk you through a simple three part mindset shift to help you keep growing, keep thriving, and keep moving forward even when life gets messy.

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Hey everybody, it’s Chad Peevy.

When I began my personal growth journey, I wasn’t just chasing success, I was searching for freedom. I wanted a life free from the consequences of growing up a gay kid in rural Arkansas and everything that came with that. And I wanted to be free too, to create the person that I always knew I was meant to be.

Well, today I’m a bestselling author and a award-winning speaker on mindset design and personal development. But that transformation didn’t happen overnight. It’s still happening, but it’s happening because I keep learning. I keep growing and I keep reading on my path. There have been three books that have made a real impact on me.

I find myself keep coming back to these books again and again as I continue to develop myself and now teach others. And so I’ve decided that once a month I would like to send one of you listeners. All three of these books, as well as a hardcover copy of my own book Break and untangle. All you have to do to win is subscribe to the podcast and then click the link in the show notes to join my newsletter, the Mindset Monday.

That’s where I share deeper insights on mindset design, human behavior, and personal reflections that you won’t find me sharing anywhere else. That’s also where I’m going to announce the winner of the drawing, so make sure you get yourself subscribed. All right, let’s get into today’s topic.

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There was once a Chinese farmer who lived a quiet life working his land and minding his own business.

One day he looks up to notice that his horse is running away. The neighbors, they hear the news, they all rush over, oh no. Oh, no, what? Terrible luck. They said, shaking their heads, the farmer, he shrugs and he just goes, maybe we’ll see Sometime later his horse comes back. But with him, he brings an entire herd of wild horses with him.

And the neighbors come back all wide-eyed and excited. This is amazing what great luck you have. And the farmer smiles. And once again, he just says, maybe we’ll see. Well, a few days later, the farmer’s only son tried to break in one of these wild horses, but the horse bucked him off and the boy broke his leg.

And here come the neighbors once again offering up their opinions. Oh no. How awful. You’ve got such terrible luck. And once again, the farmer just looks at ’em and says, maybe we’ll see. Well, not long after soldiers came through the village to draft young men to go off and fight on the front lines of a hard war, to be drafted was certain death. All the young men in the village were rounded up and sent off to fight in this war, but not the farmer’s son because he had a broken leg, and so he was spared.

As the parable of the Chinese farmer reminds us sometimes the very thing that we think is ruining our life turns out to be the very thing that saves it. It teaches us a powerful mindset wrapped up in one simple word, maybe to say maybe isn’t being passive. It’s not being indecisive. It’s simply a powerful pause that keeps us from rushing to judgment when life throws dirt in our face.

And I’ll share more with you on that in just a little bit. There are three simple ways that you can use this mindset to shift how you start to see and experience your life, especially when things feel messy or unfair or uncertain.

So let’s walk through each one. The first is to resist the rush to judge. Most of us are moving through life really, really fast and to keep up, our brains have to make quick sense of everything. When something happens, we slap a label on it, or we categorize it right away. This thing’s good, this thing’s bad.

That was a failure. That was a success. But the truth is we don’t really know, not yet, at least what you think is a problem, might actually turn out to be a gift. What feels like a loss today might lead to your biggest win tomorrow. What you think you know for sure might not be true. And that false sense of knowing it has a way of starting to poison your potential.

Why is that? It’s because we’re all working with limited information. We don’t see the whole picture when we’re standing in the frame. This is why so many people like coaching. It gives you a bigger view, it helps you slow down. It helps you see a wider perspective. You know, judgment can take a lot of forms and disguise itself in a lot of ways.

I, for one, have a really bad habit of thinking that things should just work out for me. Now, some people might call this entitlement and they’d probably be right, and here’s one of the things that I’ve learned about that. A mindset of judgment or entitlement.

It’s really just a mindset of extreme control. You see, it’s one thing to have a dream for your life. But it’s something entirely [00:05:20] different to expect that it’s all supposed to unfold exactly the way you planned and demand that it unfold. That’s just not reality. It’s a recipe for misery. I also catch myself rushing to judgment when it comes to other people.

There have been so many times when my first impression of somebody was just downright wrong, especially if that person says something or acts in a certain way that reminds me of somebody from my past. It’s just classic transference. You’ve gotta bring awareness to our past and how it shows up for us and how it’s still impacting us.

And then there’s the trap of assuming that I know what somebody else is thinking, as if I’m some sort of mind reader. And this gets me into trouble all the time, which is just another form of judgment. So the next time that life throws dirt in your face, I’m inviting you to slow down to pause. Don’t rush to judgment and remind yourself of the Chinese farmer.

Just say, is this good or bad? Maybe we’ll see the next step. You gotta learn to let go of the opinions of the herd and the Chinese farm parable. No matter what was happening, the neighbors always showed up with an opinion. I don’t know if that sounds familiar. The people in your life, your parents, your friends, your coworkers, your old classmates,

they’re all gonna have something to say about your life, your choices, your dreams to have opinions is just the default setting for human beings. But here’s what I’ve learned about that. Their opinion doesn’t have to be your reality. It’s like my mentor, Les Brown says,

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Now, that doesn’t mean you ignore everyone. Some people’s opinions really do matter. It’s good to have validation from important people in your life. It’s normal. It’s human to want some support and approval from other people. Just be careful who you give that power to, ’cause not everybody has earned it.

This happened to me just recently. I worked really hard to create this very thoughtful, high level product and experience for a company that I’ve got a long history with. In the past, we’ve worked really well together, but this time. Not so much. It’s not going well.

I thought we would still be aligned, but they just don’t see it that way or more accurately. They just probably don’t care as much as I do, and that hurts. It really hurts to not feel validated by them, but here’s the truth. I’m giving them that power and they didn’t ask for it. By doing that, I create my own misery.

I’ve been telling myself, oh, they’re gonna see the value. They’re gonna value me in what I create. They’re gonna want this and they’re gonna want me because of it. But that’s just not true. Times change, companies change, people change markets needs and priorities, they all change. Some of my greatest pain keeps coming from giving that kind of power to the wrong people.

People that didn’t even ask for it, I just hand it over. So if you’re anything like me, check in with yourself. Have you given power to somebody who hasn’t earned it? Are you carrying somebody else’s opinion around with you like it’s your truth? If so, I wanna invite you to set it down and reclaim your power.

And the third mindset of maybe is this, let’s just go ahead and assume that life is rigged in your favor. I mean, why not? Instead of worrying about what might go wrong. What if you just trusted that everything is going exactly the way it’s supposed to be? What if every no, you hear every delay, every disappointment was actually the universe conspiring in your favor.

What if the universe wasn’t trying to break you down but trying to build you up to shape you, to mold you into the person you were always meant to be? To give you the tools to share your true potential with the world because you have great potential in you. Your potential, it’s yours and we all have potential.

It’s pre-installed. It’s the reason you were put here. But what’s important to remember about our potential is that it’s very different than our outcomes. The outcomes that’s on you to reach those outcomes, to have the dream become your reality. You’re gonna have to grow.

You’re gonna have to grow into the potential, and that’s the kind of growth that requires full participation on your part. It requires resilience, which means you don’t get to quit in the middle of your story. When you start working on that dream you’ve got, when you start leaning into the purpose that you feel so deeply.

When those things start coming out of your head and entering into the real world, guess what? You’re gonna meet friction. You’re gonna meet resistance. It’s gonna feel like you’re waking up after a deep sleep. You don’t want to open your eyes. You feel tired and heavy, but you’ve gotta get up. This new thing within you has to be born.

It has to come into being. You’ve got to move because we are all waiting for you. The world needs what you’re here to give. It was given to [00:10:40] you to give to us. So come on, step into that potential. Show us what you’ve got and when the struggle comes because it will. Don’t ask, whoa, why is this happening to me?

No declare with a deep knowing that whatever it is that is happening, it is happening for me. I try to think about the story I want to tell on the other side of every struggle, and it’s taken me a long time to get into this habit, but I find it very helpful in developing some grit and resilience. Maybe it’ll help you too.

When I’m facing a hard time, I always ask myself, when this is over, what story do you want to tell? Do you want to tell a story about how you gave up? Or do you want to tell a story about your resilience? Do you wanna tell a story of winning even when the odds felt stacked against you? Do you wanna tell a story of what’s possible when you let other people in?

When you let other people help you? Do you wanna tell a story of rising above when it seems like the world is holding you down? Do you want a story of what happens when you keep believing in yourself, even when it seems like nobody else does? Or do you wanna tell a sad story with a sad ending? Because we get to choose.

As long as you don’t quit, it’s not over. We can live our life just a consequence of the last thing that happened to us. Or we can choose, we can decide to live a consequential life. You know, right now I’m in a new season. I’m shifting from running a training company in a specific industry to building a coaching company outside of that industry.

And that may sound like a small change going from training to coaching, but let me tell you, it’s not. It’s requiring something big for me. It is stretching me and by God it is testing me. And yes, it is hard, but I refuse to close the book on the page where it got hard. This chapter isn’t done yet. I will turn the page. I’m gonna continue to write this story through the struggle, and it’s gonna be a story worth telling one day. You just can’t see the big picture when you’re standing inside the frame, but you can choose how you’re gonna show up in the middle of it.

So as you go throughout your week, here’s what I want you to try. Stop being so fast to label everything that comes your way. We just don’t know yet.

Stop judging yourself so harshly. Start trusting the process. You might hear no you might feel stuck. You might wonder if it’s ever gonna work out, but maybe just maybe that delay, that detour, that struggle. It isn’t holding you back. It is setting you up. And the truth is we’re still in the middle of the story and we just don’t know yet.

So breathe, stay open and keep moving forward.

And may you have joy, peace and happiness, good health and wellbeing, a life of ease and prosperity. The courage to get what you want from this life. The clarity to know what that is. The imagination, to not sell yourself short and the discipline to see it through.