I packed up my things and my brother took me to the airport.
I had gone to visit family for a couple weeks after deciding to shut down my startup.
I was going to fly to visit a friend who was having a Murder Mystery Halloween Party.
I got to dress up like Sherlock Holmes.
Fun party.
I went a day early since I mostly went to visit my friend so we had some time t0 hang out.
He had also been going through some big changes in his business so we had lots to talk about.
After talking a while about what we wanted in life an idea emerged.
It was radical.
It was exciting.
And it felt right.
You see, I had been living and breathing agriculture my entire life, growing up on my families farm and building a startup in agriculture.
My entire personal, professional, and online network was completely focused on agriculture.
I wasn't feeling bad about that necessarily but the worlds a big place and you only get one life.
I had a fear that maybe I was stuck in a local maximum.
Now even if this sounds like some version of shiny object syndrome, because it is, the important part for me was that I was feeling it strongly.
I find if you feel something and you don't take care of getting through that feeling you die a little inside.
I needed to explore it.
The radical idea was to take a year off.
But not just any year off.
Not tequila on the beach in Mexico for 12 months .
( although I did do some of that )
I was going to alter my brain in a very different way.
I was going to spend 12 months de-programming myself.
Leaving my market not just physically but in mind and spirt too.
I was going to spend 12 months erasing existing thought patterns and running a deep clean cycle by not even allowing myself to think of my past market.
For me that meant deprogramming 30 years of agriculture from my brain.
... and then feeling free to come back if I wanted too.
I came up with some rules:
Though shalt not start another company in agriculture for 1 year. Though shalt not think about ideas in agriculture for 1 year. Though shalt not read about agriculture for 1 year. Not starting a company is pretty easy.
You can do this by just being lazy.
Lazy was not the goal.
Not reading about it was not that hard either but required some work.
I had to do a few things that felt like a mix of Black Mirror and 1984.
I unsubscribed from all the blogs and media that I was a regular consumer off apologizing to the people who where close friends.
I mass unfollowed and I blocked a ton of words on twitter so I would not run into tweets about harvesting corn, Agtech SaaS fundraising etc.
I did this for every platform.
The hardest part for sure was not "thinking" about things in agriculture.
If you have ever been deep into something you will have it running like a parallel process in your mind all day.
See some cool product packaging at the store?
I bet that would work good for x product in my niche.
See some new tech businesses doing x for y?
I bet that strategy could work for pork farmers in Iowa.
Etc Etc.
This is essentially impossible to do from day one but slowly, if you give it effort and consciously choose what thoughts not to think, you can do it in 3 - 6 months.
6 months in.
You are a new you.
The plan worked better than I could have asked and I learned things I could not have planned.
The things I expected to happen happened.
Six months in I had become a blockchain developer and was traveling to a new country every month participating in hackathons and contributing to open source projects ranging from book publishing to labor markets.
It was very fun and I was exploring spaces I never would have had a chance to if I hadn't forced a change in my life.
Then there where the unexpected learnings.
"The teacher will appear when the student is ready."
I learned about my identity.
But not in the way your probably thinking.
It wasn't the old lesson about not wrapping your identity in your startup, I did learn that one as well, but thats well known and written about everywhere.
What I learned is how much your identity in a business or industry can be propped up in you mind by all the people you respect and want the respect of in that space.
It turns out if you remove all the "important" people from your industry from your life and mind a lot of the not useful parts of this identity construct collapses.
You stop caring what people think at a new level and in a healthy way.
When there's no one around there's no one to impress or worry about.
It's a refreshing freedom you didn't know you where missing out on.
Overall the rules worked and the idea was a success.
Did it cost me a year or more?
Yes.
Does that reduce my potential over a long time horizon?
Highly doubt it.
Will I do work in agriculture again?
Probably.
But this time I will know I'm doing it by choice and not by accident which was the most important thing to learn for myself.
Should you do it?
No idea. It was useful for me and I wanted to share it in case it feels like it might work for you.
Your brain and life are not that much different from other complex systems in your life.
Have you tried shutting it off and turning it back on?