By: Stephen Bishop
In a moment of inspiration, I once grabbed a crowbar and decided on a whim to start a small home improvement project—that is, re-siding my old farmhouse with Hardie board and installing insulation in the walls in the process. Now, two and a half years later, I’m finally on the last wall of my house and I no longer feel inspired. And I can firmly say I’m now anti-inspiration. I’ve come to the conclusion that if I need to be inspired to do something, that something probably doesn’t need to be done.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure I saved money by doing the work myself, but I likely also lost several years off my life-expectancy due to lead poisoning. People always talk about how well-built old homes are, but I think old homes are just well armored. The old wood boards I pried off my house were likely covered in so much lead that I could have pawned them off as metal at the scrap yard. They had at least a dozen layers of paint, dating back to the original paint used way back in 1893.
On a more positive note, in the two and a half years it has taken me to re-side our house, I’ve had a lot of time to think about life priorities and core values while climbing up and down a ladder toting Hardie board. After one day of much introspection and ladder climbing, I decided upon the following maxim as my new personal life slogan, “Never start a project you can’t finish in two hours.”
In beekeeping, I’ve had similar moments of overzealous inspiration that reinforced the wisdom of this maxim. To save money, I once thought I’d build a hundred bee boxes myself using my table saw. My first five homemade boxes were so revolutionary in design they resembled something you might see in a Picasso painting; they were that out of square. That said, if you ever want to increase your comb production, give your bees a good cattywampus homemade box. You’ll have all the burr comb you could ever desire.
“Why did I need 100 bee boxes?” Because on some preceding day, as if struck by another bolt of inspiration, I decided I would become a sideline beekeeper and use my future sideline beekeeping earnings for the noble cause of paying off my mortgage early. Yes, I know that may be the funniest thing I’ve ever written, but stop your belly laughing. I wasn’t too far off. If only I’d have used the money I invested in sideline beekeeping then I would have certainly paid off my mortgage early.
Alas, some people have eyes bigger than their stomach and overeat. I have inspiration bigger than my ability and over-aim. The problem with inspiration is that it’s great at getting people to start and commit, but terrible at getting people to follow through and finish. Once the inspiration is gone, what you’re left with is not so much a dream, but a project. And projects are time-consuming things that can only be finished board by board if you’re re-siding your house—or hive by hive if you’re building your apiary. The important thing I’ve learned about long-term projects is to just keep plugging away at them and don’t stop. Momentum, however minimal, is still momentum, and it’s a lot easier to keep going than to restart.
Ten years after my sideline beekeeping inspiration, I no longer feel so much inspired by beekeeping as addicted to it, but I’m now halfway to one hundred hives and haven’t stopped. Believe it or not, my bees are actually turning a profit and maybe, just maybe they’ll contribute a dividend back to their owner’s mortgage this year (stop your snickering).
That said, now that I’m finally finished writing this, I’m seriously considering updating my personal life slogan yet again, to something more fitting for a parent of a toddler, something like: “Never start a project you can’t finish in twenty minutes.”
Stephen Bishop keeps bees while perpetually repairing his old farmhouse in Shelby, NC. You can receive his weekly farm blog updates at misfitfarmer.com or follow him on Twitter @themisfitfarmer
