Paint your wagon

Steve and I finished working on his 16 ft. flatbed trailer, making it into a campaign wagon.  It looks like the Sooner Schooner but says “Steve  Vaughan State House” on the canopy.  Tag put some retainer pipes on the sides. We used plumbing pipe and then altered and re-altered our design.  In the end, we decided that there was a better way to have done it, but it turned out quite cool the way we did it.  Then we were off to the Pawhuska Independence Day parade and Lake Ponca fireworks slicing watermelons for giveaway. 

Our Christmas Market Oklahoma is moving along quite swell.  We now have over 15 people working on the event, have scheduled the city mobile stage for the music, have arranged with an electrician to put in temporary power, mapped the event, and every group is doing their thing from decorations to food to marketing to vendors.  And again, we have made a lot of wrong turns and would do it better next time, but the thing will surely come off as a great new festival for our town (I hope.  But hope is not a strategy.). 

Someone calculated that the Apostle Paul walked over 28,000 miles in his 4 known missionary journeys.  So that is about 5 miles a day of walking for 20 years.  The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.  If Paul had not been a determined walker, he would have gotten nowhere. 

What I see when I work with folks is utterly too much analyzing and communication.  I go to the lumberyard and employees are talking, talking, talking on these darned walkie talkie things and never load your lumber.  So I wrote the company’s CEO and told him I was a small business guy and noticed this behavior. Take away their stupid phones! His company seems to have learned because they no longer do that.  Go to a committee meeting at church and people sit around philosophizing continually about church life.  We need to do those meetings without chairs.  Like the lumberyard walkie talkies, we are using a chair crutch as an excuse for little activity.  I once talked to a bishop who told me he had 59 churches in his area and 20 were without pastors.  “Every church I talk to,” he said, “wants an entrepreneurial pastor.  Trouble is, only 3% of pastors are entrepreneurial.” You know how to tell if a guy is entrepreneurial?  See if he hates meetings.  See if he humbly admits he has spun his wheels on projects a lot. See if he tirelessly works on a mission from all angles.

The conventional wisdom is that an entrepreneur thinks his product through, assembles his staff and under wonderful directions, gets a stunningly splendid product into the market.  Pah! He gets off his kiester and tries something.  If it works part way, he makes adjustments, adjustments, adjustments. It’s chaotic at times.  He manages to avoid bankruptcy several times.  Or he doesn’t and comes back to try again.  Others look at him and say, “the poor devil just doesn’t know when he is beat!” 

And so it was that Paul was run out of synagogues repeatedly but kept walking.  Vaughan just keeps going to events and shaking hands.  “Kissing babies” he laughs.  But through that tireless listening, he understands his folks, gains their trust, gets their good ideas for legislation, and gets supporters to walk beside him.

An entrepreneur likes to have a partner who spurs him when things get discouraging or does what his talent lacks.  And you can learn to be this kind of person, the way a farm kid gets lectured about “when you see work to be done, get started without being asked.”

Gotta go.  Got things to do.