But Who Will Pick the Cotton?

150 years ago, here in the U.S., we were grappling with a very ugly piece of our history. We couldn’t decide if we should free all our slaves or not. And we ended up fighting a pretty nasty war about it.

Obviously, in the end, good prevailed. Funny how the answer seems so obvious after the fact, right?

In The South, much of the agriculture business was based around slavery. With an economy so dependent on slaves to do things for us for free, the question of the time was:

“If we free the slaves, who will pick the cotton?”

150 years ago, there wasn’t enough foresight to realize that with progress and innovation, we’d eventually pick whole cotton fields with one big piece of automated machinery.

The rationale seemed to be, “We’d like to do the right thing, but we’re afraid we’re not smart enough to adapt if we do.”

Unfortunately, not a lot has changed since then.

Today, you can draw the same parallel to many of our modern concerns like climate change, gay marriage, and other dilemmas that involve trading comfort for the opportunity to do the right thing.

The sentiment is, “We’d like to do it, but we’re not sure if we can deal with the change.”

When I started The Bootstrapper Guild last year, I asked myself, “Can I really do this? It’s a lot of work!”

I almost didn’t go through with the project because I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to handle running Riskology.co, writing guest posts, and also create something new for a business project every single week.

Eventually, I went ahead and did it anyway and things have turned out fine. We have a nice little community, I have a new project, and I still get to work on exciting things right here at AR. It’s business as usual—or not.

I hadn’t given myself enough credit, and I hadn’t accounted for Parkinson’s Law.

Everyone realizes this—you experience it all the time—but it doesn’t make getting started any easier.

Something new always looks and sounds scary. That is, until you do it. Once it’s done, it doesn’t take long to become routine. You forget you ever had trouble doing it in the first place.

Try to remember this the next time you find yourself saying: “I’d like to do the right thing, but I don’t know if I can handle it.”

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Photo by: bara-koukoug