Tara-Nicholle Nelson · Transformation Tuesday | The best growth book I read this year📙

A student-friend of mine is at a crossroads in her life. 

She recently turned 40. 

She has a great job and a great family, but has become aware that something’s missing. 

There’s a visionary dream that she’s never quite given herself full permission to pursue…until now. 

She’s in the process of taking the first few steps out of her shadow life and into her unlived life. 

And she’s hitting all the neurobiological, psychological, emotional and spiritual milestones I’ve come to know and love along the journey from self-doubt and self-sabotage to radical self-liberation and self-actualization. 

First, she hit the fear milestone… that electric fence around your current life that shocks you back into smallness and complacency anytime you try to step out. 

And I told her: The fear feels real but it’s not true. And it’s never to be obeyed. It’s just a program. And the first step to dissolving the program is seeing the program. 

In other words, you’re doing it right.

Then she hit the “untethering” milestone. The wondering of what you do really want to do with this one wild and precious life once you start to come out from under the influence of the Inner Critic and the lies of culture. The feeling of being alone and without a rudder as you begin to realize the values everyone around you is using to make their Big Life Decisions mean little or nothing to you, and it dawns on you that there’s no turning back and from here on out, you’ll have to make sovereign decisions based on what FEELS right to you.

And I coached her: The untethering is a turnaway from external guidance to internal. When you hit that, it means you’re doing it right. What you’re doing is slowly turning away from the external validation you’ve been getting on the hamster wheel and learning to navigate your life by your Inner Guidance instead.

There’s no blueprint for that life. You’ve got to build the spiritual muscle of getting comfortable doing the fearless, disorienting, experimental thing. 

So that’s disorienting. If you feel like some cosmic hand picked you up off your life roadmap and set you back down somewhere x… you’re doing it right. 

The other day she asked me if I had a book recommendation for this season of her life, and I thought I’d share my answer with you, because this book is the single best business, life, personal growth and spiritual book I read this year (and I read a lot). 

This book was published in 1998.

It is not and has never been a bestseller. 

And the title might surprise you… it’s called: You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Start and Succeed in a Farming Enterprise, by Joel Salatin. 

Now, my friend doesn’t want to be a farmer. I (not-so-secretly) do. 

But I still want her (and you!) to read this book, because it’s advice is simple, fresh, aligned with my Spiritual Strategy methods, and surprisingly relevant to any dream, desire, vision or goal you might have in your heart.

Salatin gives advice like: 

1. Be a spiritual contrarian. This book is hopeful and optimistic about what is possible from the point of view of a guy who just flat out wanted to start a farm at a time where farms are supposed to be bad business… and then did it, successfully. He starts with how to develop your vision for your farm (and life), and shares his contrarian point of view about how the farming industry’s troubles create massive opportunities for those who choose to dive in but do things a contrarian kind of way. 

In many ways, this is a book about how to prioritize your dreams over your fears. 

2. Stop trying to copy what someone else is doing and work from first principles instead. You Can Farm shares the author’s own stories about being a total weirdo and figuring out how to create a profitable farm from scratch, going back to the basics of profitable business, his own inspired ideas and values about farming in a way that is beneficial to all.

He urges baby farmers to stop comparing themselves to other farms, taking advice from banker or salespeople or doing things the way they’ve always been done. In fact, he spends more time helping the reader create confidence, vision and alignment with their loved ones than he even spends on the nuts-and-bolts of farming.

3. “Big Dream” success stories. I find that in any crowd of successful people, talk of dreams and goals almost immediately veers into troubleshooting what could go wrong (in an effort to avoid all unwanted outcomes), bonding over scarcity and fondling fear and struggle.

When you’re about to go after a visionary goal, it helps to stop talking to pessimists and immerse yourself in successful Big Dream energy like the inspiring success stories in You Can Farm. 

4. No false prerequisites. Salatin says if you want to be a farmer, the first step is NOT to go out and buy farmland. The FIRST step is to start growing something—anything—on whatever patch of dirt you have access to now… even if you live in an apartment and have nothing but a window box and some pots. That’s how you start learning what you need to learn to enlarge your territory over time.

He talks about many profitable farms that run on land rented from the people who bought the farms and don’t know what to do with the land. 

He also flips conventional wisdom on its head when he says the best farmland is very close to or IN a high-population area, not remote or rural. Reading his thoughts about that inspired me to go way bigger with my food garden on the quarter-acre I have right in the middle of the City of Oakland, vs. waiting until I acquire my Farm by the Beach. 

Let the walls of delay now crumble away, as the affirmation goes. 

5. Recipes for failure. Too big a mortgage. Too much money in single-use machines. Too much forgetting that the farm is a business. Too much working on things that don’t profit the farm, and not enough energy to grow the farm. Too little alignment between family members. Too little philosophical foundation in “why” you’re doing what you’re doing. 

Salatin’s list of “recipes for failure” is written in farm-speak, but each and every line item has a direct parallel for any kind of dream, goal or creative endeavor you may have in mind. 

6. Good enough is good enough. Part of how You Can Farm snaps you out of the paralysis of analysis is by lowering the perfectionist bar. He keeps you from majoring in the minors. He talks about farmers who spend a lot of time studying how to do things, versus his own value system of: do it now, figure it out as you go and just make it good enough. 

He reminds you that every step is an experiment, that patience is the name of the farming game, and that the joy is in the journey (not just the outcomes). 

7. Kill sacred cows to stay super flexible. The book goes IN on the American fixation with owning homes and things. He shares how large real estate mortgages and big, 100-year buildings create more bondage than freedom for the farmer, their children and their children’s children. 
His advice is to rent the land if you need to! And whatever you do, don’t mortgage it so much you have to work a job that keeps you from farming in order to pay the bill. 

Oh and don’t buy or build buildings for uses you’re not even sure you’ll want to do 10 years down the road. 

All of this is wise advice for any creator creating anything. Start with the minimum viable version. See what happens. Iterate and optimize. Just take a baby step. Trust that small things grow. 

Stay flexible for your future.

And… whatever you hold sacred? Constantly examine and reconsider whether it matters at all. 

Chances are good that You Can Farm is not about whatever your personal business or life goal is about. But that’s precisely the power of it. It’s not a self-help book, and it’s not in the normal jargon of self-help speak. 

Written for farmers, not readers or executives, the advice it gives is simple and inspiring, like this snippet from Chapter 1: 

“Write down your dreams. Write them down often. Speak of them to your relatives and friends. Seek out people who share those dreams; ignore those who do not. Don’t spend time with naysayers. As your vision becomes your passion, dreams will give place to reality. My prayer is that together we can help this happen for you.”

Here’s to confidence, vision and the easeful, joyful, Divinely assisted creation of whatever your personal “farm” may be. 

Head up + heart out,

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Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Inner Critic Coach™️
Founder + CEO of SoulTour