The elusivity of obsoletion

One of my favorite parts of being a bootstrapping entrepreneur is getting to wake up every morning with infinite opportunity to tweak and improve our work and business. Whether a new process, communication technique, software feature, or power tool, I love the instant feedback of successful improvement.

The strange flip-side to this, though, is how quickly the old, more difficult way to do things is forgotten. There is a never-ending list of changes we’ve made to our composting and farming, from the backyard at the beginning of 2018 to the soil farm today. Beth and I scratch our heads thinking about the days when we turned massive windrows with pitchforks before building Bioreactors (still a manual process). Then, shopping for pallets behind strip malls, and needing to set up camp on grass and level out the Bioreactor frame before filling it up. It was just in the past couple months we located a steady supply of ideal pallets, and constructed a concrete to assemble them on.

These are two big shifts impacting just one aspect of what we do, and not only is it hard to fathom how we did these things before, we could not go back. Seriously, the tedious past is a hell we escaped from, and there is no return. Today? Today is just how we do things, but yesterday is the abyss.