A few weeks ago, right around Father’s Day, I got to thinking about my own Dad and what I’ve learned from him about being a successful entrepreneur. As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up on a farm in Idaho where my Dad farmed with his father (my Grandpa Hanks), and his brothers (my Uncles). My Mom’s father also ran a ranch–his was in the middle of the desert in western Utah–so farming and ranching was what I was raised on, big-time! From the time I could talk back to my parents until I left home to attend college here in Utah, I worked on our farm, and when I went to visit my other Grandpa on his ranch for a ‘vacation,’ I worked then too.

With that in mind, here’s what I learned from my Dad and both of my Grandfathers about entrepreneurship:

Work is Hard

Hard work will always win out over creative or smart work or whatever else you might want to call it. When I wrote about Planing your Work and Working your Plan, a large part of that post was to suggest that working hard is the secret ingredient in the recipe for entrepreneurial success. For every entrepreneur whose success you choose to credit because they ‘out-smarted’ their competition, I’ll show you 100 other entrepreneurs who flat-out ‘out-worked’ theirs.

Growing up, I watched as my dad worked extremely hard on our farm. He worked harder than any of us kids ever did. He also worked harder than my Uncles did, and he certainly worked harder than any of our neighbors did. And when farming became more difficult, I saw him continue on with the hard work while simultaneously going back to school–at Idaho State University–to earn his teaching credentials so he could eventually teach school. For two years, he rode a bus one hour each way from our house to Pocatello, Idaho. Each day, he’d waking up at crazy hours just to keep the farm going, all the while pulling down a 4.0 GPA in school. To say my Dad worked hard would be an understatement; he worked extremely hard, and that might be an understatement in and of itself. To this day, my Dad still works hard, and it always pays off. If nothing else, I know I learned my work ethic from watching and modeling after my Dad.

Work Can and Should Be Fun

I saw in my Dad as well, that with hard work you can and should also make work fun. Some of my best memories from growing up come from working alongside my siblings and my Mom and Dad, and my Uncles and Grandparents too. We would thin and hoe beets together, move cows together, and change the animals’ water together. But as hard as the work was, my Dad always encouraged us to find ways to have fun doing it. If you cannot seem to have fun while doing your work, then you need to reevaluate your work or your status as an entrepreneur. He knew that to spend 12-plus hours a day working the land was hard enough, and that to be successful at it, you needed to have fun while doing it. The same holds true for anything in life worth attaining, especially as a result of entrepreneurial pursuits.

You Cannot Change What You Cannot Change

One of the most valuable lessons my Dad ever taught me was that I couldn’t control everything. I remember once when a really wicked hailstorm came through our part of Idaho and totally wiped out our sugar beet crop, that I told my Dad that you could stop that from happening, and he said, “No son, you can’t. You do what you can to grow good crops, and you focus on what is in your control. You can’t control the weather or the price of commodities.” So, for the things in your control, do the very best you can, and for those things you cannot control, try not to worry about them. Protect against them if you can (that year, we had hail insurance on our beets), and choose instead to focus your energies on the areas where you truly do have the ability to influence outcomes.

You Reap What You Sew

This typical law of the harvest certainly applies to me. (Surprise, huh…that I learned about the law of the harvest from my Dad.) If you plant crappy seeds, you’ll have a crappy crop. If you don’t water on time, you’ll have a crappy crop. An entrepreneur needs to realize this. The efforts and intentions you put into your business, whether they be ideas or resources like employees or technology, need to be good, or the output of your efforts won’t be. I know that’s one reason why at Doba I spend so much time focusing on our employees, because they are the core input for a business.

Creativity

I have to admit that while I’m generally a workaholic, there’s another part of me that’s a little bit lazy. The work part typically wins out, but as a teenager growing up on a farm, the lazy side won more than its share of battles. Working on a farm is hard blasted work, and I was always trying to think of better and easier ways to do the work. That mindset was developed over the years, and I think is at the core of my success as an entrepreneur. Being the type of person who is just not satisfied with some things, I always think there has to be an easier and better way of doing it, which in my professional life has always resulted in building a better mousetrap.

At the end of the day, I credit my Dad with helping me learn those five entrepreneurial attributes (there are more of course, but I’ll save those for the book). To my Dad:

Belated Happy Father’s Day! Thanks for teaching me so well (I love you for that, and more). I hope you had a great Father’s Day. I think about my two kids now, and I wonder how I can teach them what you taught me and what I now take for granted.

I really believe that some lessons in life can’t be taught in any other ways. Working on a farm or ranch is the ideal environment to train leaders and entrepreneurs. It’s tangible. You can touch and feel the work. My kids will probably never understand what I do on a daily basis as the CEO of Doba, or any other business for that matter. I’m going to either have to really work hard at teaching them these same lessons, or maybe I’ll just have to see if the Hanks farm in Idaho can continue on for a few more generations so we can all do summer family ‘vacations’ to the farm.