Recently I was shoveling shit in hell.
It was a hot day and I was performing my least favorite farm chore—the twice-a-year chicken coop clean-out.
This set me thinking while I shoveled … First, I thought about the phrase “I’d rather be shoveling shit in hell.” I often use it in conversation.
Friend: “How’d you like to have Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ job?”
Me: “I’d rather be shoveling shit in hell.”
The expression is a cliché. But—I thought—clichés only become clichés because they express a truth. And the truth is I’d rather be cleaning out the chicken coop than …
Trying to sell Puerto Rican utility bonds.
Balancing the state budget of Illinois.
Negotiating Brexit.
Attempting to forge a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.
Be in the same room as Elizabeth Warren.
A cliché may be overused and trite. “Nobody loves you like your mother.” But a cliché represents an idea we all agree on—and there aren’t enough ideas we all agree on in America these days.
Maybe America should be more clichéd. Maybe we should have a society, a business world, and a political system based on clichés. I can think of some good ones.
All men are created equal.
They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Cleaning the chicken coop might seem to be an odd way of pursuing happiness. But I can tell you, from a certain amount of personal experience, that it’s a better path to lasting joy than drink, drugs, and adultery.
The chicken coop wouldn’t need to be cleaned out again for six months. With drink, drugs, and adultery, you can find yourself cleaned out the following morning.
Cleaning the chicken coop is also honest work, and when I’m done I’ve accomplished something (at least for the chickens).
This gives me more dignity than I have in most of the rest of my life—making fun of people for a living, being a second-string parent, failing to train my bird dogs, and taking eight strokes on a par 3 at the golf course (and that’s after I’ve fudged my scorecard).
No one on earth has the right to look down on those who do honest work and accomplish something. Even if what they accomplish is a pile of chicken shit.
I may be filthy, sweaty, and stinking, but I rank higher in the aristocracy of life than people who do no work and accomplish nothing and much higher than the parasites who do dishonest work and suck the blood out of the accomplishments of others. This means that, compared with about 95 percent of America’s elected officials, I am an imperial majesty—as long as I stick to cleaning my chicken coop.
Also, cleaning the chicken coop gives me an opportunity to do this kind of deep thinking. Mindless labor is a thought-provoking activity.
Not to compare my thinking to Einstein’s, but I’ll bet Einstein was doing something like cleaning a chicken coop when “E=mc2“ popped into his head.
(Actually he was working in the Swiss Patent Office. Which really does sound like shoveling shit in hell. Imagine day after day immersed in Germanically precise and detailed official documents concerning cuckoo-clock intellectual property.)
My thoughts ran to more prosaic subjects. Such as, “Where did all the shit come from?”
I have only eight chickens. They live in a large coop, about eight by twelve feet. The coop opens into an even larger pen, at least twelve by twenty. And every bit of the coop and the pen was covered in chicken shit.
Using a gravel rake and a garden spade, I filled my tractor bucket three times. That’s enough to load a full-size pickup truck’s bed to the brim.
As I delved and heaved, I began calculating the number of bags of layer-hen feed I buy; the frequency of my wife’s giving the chickens vegetable trimmings, wilted lettuce, leftover Brussels sprouts, etc., and how long it had been since I last cleaned the coop.
The chickens are pooping more than they eat!
If the chickens were a business I was considering investing in, I’d smell something rotten. (Of course, in this case, I was smelling something rotten anyway.) When a corporation says it bought a ton of steel from which it manufactured two tons of steel widgets, I want to see the corporation’s books.
My chickens don’t keep books (so far as I know). But they’re up to something.
Are they sneaking out of the coop at night and going to McDonald’s? Maybe they’re taking my car, with one chicken pecking the accelerator and another pecking the brake pedal while a third perches on the steering wheel. I should roll up the windows and quit leaving the keys in the ignition and my spare change in the cup holder.
I kept shoveling and had yet another thought. The chickens are a business. And I did invest in it. In fact, I invested quite a bit. There was the capital expense of building the coop and the pen, the cost of the chickens themselves, plus the cost of the chicken feed (the price of which is not, by the way, “chicken feed”). Then there’s what I paid for the heated poultry waterer, the infrared lamp to keep the coop warm on freezing New England nights, the laying boxes, the feed trays, the feed scoop, and the mouse-proof feed bin. Not to mention what my feeding, water replenishment, egg collection, and coop clean-out time is worth, even figured at minimum-wage rates.
The return I get is one egg per day per hen (if she feels like it). Pricing that out, I figure each sunny-side up I have for breakfast sets me back about $1.50.
Even so, shoveling shit in hell turns out to be a good thing … in the following ways:
I got some exercise.
I did some deep thinking.
And I learned four important lessons about business and investing …
1. Because people say the same thing over and over again doesn’t mean it isn’t true. There’s no value in being contrarian just to be contrary.
2. Never undervalue honest work that accomplishes something, no matter how humble that something seems to be. This goes for employees and employers alike and for husbands, wives, friends, associates, chairmen of Fortune 500 companies, the people emptying those companies’ wastepaper baskets, and me.
3. Be alert to mismatches between input and output. Take the Snapchat social media company as an example. Snapchat’s output is supposed to be millions and millions in revenue. But Snapchat’s input is just a bunch of social media or, as I would call it, “a pile of chicken shit.”
4. Don’t keep chickens.