The Best of Ellijay, Blue Ridge & Jasper Funpaper issue 7 | Page 63

Excerpt from local author Raland Patterson's Book,
Silver Bullets for Managers

I

n my quest to find the best illustrations for my
ponderings, I recalled a number of stupid things
I’ve done in my life. It is true that everyone
makes mistakes from time to time, or participates
in foolish acts. Nevertheless, one particular stupid
decision I made as a child still bothers me as an adult, simply because I didn’t
feel my decision was stupid at the time. In fact, I felt inspired by my brilliance
in discovering an immediate solution to my problem.
I was born and raised on a small 200-acre farm in northern Georgia. My family raised cattle, horses, pigs and corn. At one end of our meadow we had three
haystacks, each rising approximately twenty feet in height. I had friends who
lived “in the area” (I can’t say neighborhood because city folks think in blocks).
We thought in miles. However, I don’t remember losing a lot of time worrying
about walking to my friends’ houses.
One afternoon my friends and I decided to have a corncob fight around those
twenty-foot haystacks. Once the corn was removed from the cob, the cob was
very light. What this meant to the thrower was that the cob lost momentum and
distance very quickly. The hitting distance, or “kill-zone”, was twenty feet or
less. Even at this short distance, healthy farm boys could quickly move out of
the path of an on-target cob.
The problem as I saw it was that the corncobs were just too light. The next
time we went to the corncrib to reload our arsenal, I was inspired with a solution that would increase the weight of the corncobs. I knew there were plenty
of leftover corncobs in the pigpen. The difference between the cobs in the pigpen and the ones in the corncrib was that the cobs in the pigpen were wet! I
knew wet cobs were heavy, and heavy cobs fly faster and farther. How’s that for
inspiration?
Fully loaded, we all moved back to our fighting positions. James was going
to be my first victim because he was predictable. (You do not want to be predictable in a corncob fight.) Every time I threw a corncob that whizzed past
him, he would immediately stick his head out from behind the haystack and
throw his cob. My plan was to lob a dry corncob underhanded with my left hand
and then throw the wet one with my right. My plan worked. Just before the dry
cob hit the ground, I hurled the wet cob as hard as I could at the place where
James always stuck his head out. This time was no different; his head was exactly where I predicted it would be. The cob hit James directly on the left temple, and he dropped like a rag doll. The other boys saw the blow and ran to
James’ side.
One announced, “I think you killed him!”
I was in shock. To make matters worse, James’ entire body began to shake.
At the time it reminded me of a chicken with its head cut off. The first thing
that ran through my mind was: How am I going to tell Daddy I killed James?
Luckily, I never had to confess to corncob murder. James woke up, and he
didn’t even cry. All he said was, “Don’t you go telling my mother!”
I stood there in a daze. I tried to relax and think about what my dad would
say or do. That was easy. He said the same thing every time I did something
stupid: “Son, did you learn anything from this?”
My answer was always, “Yes, sir.” In most cases I was glad he didn’t ask me
what I had learned because I didn’t know. In this case the obvious answer to
Daddy’s question was, “Don’t hit your friend in the head with a wet corn cob.”
What I learned in a broader sense is that my first solution to a problem is not
always the right one. Later on, I realized this lesson applied to quick fixes in
business also. I discovered that the quick fix was almost always wrong.

Read Our Story On Rayland - www.thebestofebrj.com/patterson/

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."- Charles Duell, Director of U,S, Patent Offive, 1899

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