Across my 20 years with Planfarm, this is my 5th contribution to Landline.

Why you may ask?

Well, the first article I wrote in my first 3 months with the business led to being threatened with a lawsuit. The second had a major bank demand I put a half-page apology in The West Australian (I refused by the
way), and the last two received negative client feedback. So, let’s just say I am a little scarred by the experience.

Hopefully, this article will be received more positively.

On one day recently, three unrelated things occurred that had me thinking about how we react to both positive and negative events. These three things were.

A podcast I was listening to whilst on my regular trip from my home in Narrogin to Planfarm’s Osborne Park office. A meeting with one of our consultants where we were discussing the
implementation of a contract we had just been awarded that we had been working on for more than 12 months. And the last was an evening with Nigella Lawson at the Concert Hall.

As you can see very unrelated.

The podcast, and where the title comes from was ‘The Howie Games’ where host Mark Howard was having a conversation with Craig McRae (Collingwood coach) about his sporting career with a particular focus on coaching styles of the past and the present. The meeting with the consultant was focused on the workload in front of us now and the evening with Nigella Lawson on food, cooking and life in general.

Craig McRae, on the Howie Games podcast, talks about the philosophy of Deep Wins and Shallow Losses. Essentially this means that they have instilled a culture of putting greater emphasis on celebrating and enjoying their wins than they do on analysing their losses. That is not to say they don’t learn from the losses and review them, the philosophy speaks to a greater focus on success rather than failure, something that I feel most of us are not good at, including myself.

In the meeting with the consultant, we found ourselves focusing on the work in front of us and the obvious delivery challenge and spent no time reflecting on the success of achieving something that we had worked very hard on for more than 12 months. I found myself thinking of the podcast and finalised our meeting reflecting on our success and how the consultant should be proud of her efforts and take some time absorbing this. Yes, the challenge in implementing this contract is immense and the work in front of us significant, however we hadn’t until that point, spent any energy celebrating what we had achieved.

As for Nigella Lawson, what a thoughtful person. She had the audience enthralled by her views on cooking and life in general. Clearly, the majority of the audience were Nigella ‘groupies’ so they were inevitably going to hang off every word. I can’t cook anything beyond a BBQ, a roast and boil an egg and I have little interest in learning more or even cooking something that requires a recipe. However, human interest and the perspective of others interest me and Nigela’s message was that cooking is just cooking and that we should celebrate when we cook something that we or others enjoy and don’t stress when it doesn’t work. The people around us, partners, kids, friends, and most relatives, will appreciate your efforts and not worry if it doesn’t work. They will eat your cooking again.

So why did these three random events have such an impact on me that I would focus on it in my 5th ever article in 20 years? Well, that came when I was conducting a review with a client. The client’s business is very strong, and they have built great wealth over the past 10 years from their hard work and concentrating on the things that work for them. They are not a large farm, but they do what they do very well.

2023 was profitable, which I am well aware was not the same for many, but nowhere near as profitable as it had been in the past due to low sheep prices and a wheat yield impacted by the dry season. I found that we were focusing and putting more effort into what went wrong and very little energy into what worked well and how successful the business had been. We focused on a lower-than-usual lambing percentage and not the success of the strategy and effort put into reducing the average age of the ewe flock and how that had enabled them to have a higher average sheep price than any other client I had reviewed to date. We spent more effort on the reasons for the low wheat yield and little effort on celebrating the above average barley yield and how that contributed to the result. Upon realising that this seemed to be the theme of the day and reflecting on the three random events, we spent the last part of the review acknowledging the success of the business over the last 10 years, how they should be very proud of their efforts, and to spend more time thinking about this than, what are the minor negatives of the 2024 season.

To add to these events and due to the amount of time I spend driving, along with podcasts, I have taken to audiobooks. My current book is ‘The Art of Happiness’ by His Holiness The Dalai Lama and Howard C Cutler. In this book, The Dalai Lama proposes the fundamental human proposition is to be happy. His Holiness suggests to be truly happy one must train oneself to focus on what makes us happy and to not focus on and remove what is destructive in our lives.

How does this relate to ‘Deep Wins and Shallow Losses’? If we follow the views of the Dalai Lama, we will spend more time and energy on wins, which make us happy, than losses, which make us unhappy as these can be destructive. That is not to say that he does not suggest that we spend no energy on the destructive but only limit this to recognising these traits such that we learn from them.

The combination of the three random events on one day and The Art of Happiness has had me reflecting on how I balance the successes in life and the failures. We have far more successes than we have failures yet I, and likely many of you, spend more time and energy on the failures than the successes. This is something I am going to make more effort on in the future as I believe I will be happier.

Here’s to ‘Deep Wins, Shallow Losses!’