REMOVE THE MIDDLEMAN
I used to talk about this a lot in my videos and radio shows, and lately I’ve been thinking about it again. One of the simplest ways I know to improve almost anything in life is: Remove the middleman whenever you can.
Want better food? Get closer to where it came from.
Grow it. Know the farmer. Buy from the person who harvested it. Eat the tomato that was allowed to become a tomato before somebody picked it green, put it on a truck, sent it through warehouses and refrigerated it halfway across the country….or half way around the globe……
I spent years thinking I didn’t like certain fruits and vegetables. Turns out I didn’t dislike the food. I disliked the flavorless copy of it.
Eat a fig warm from your own tree or a melon you watched grow all summer and suddenly you understand just how enormous the difference can be. And I don’t think this lesson stops with food.
Want a deeper spiritual life? Spend some time actually experiencing the sacred instead of depending entirely upon somebody else to describe it to you.
Want a better relationship? Talk to the person. Not their friend. Not Facebook. Not everybody except the person you actually have the relationship with.
Want to know where your money goes? Buy something from the person who made it.
Want to understand a subject? Go closer to the original source.
Read the research. Ask questions. Learn enough to form your own understanding instead of repeating somebody else’s summary.
Want to understand yourself? Pay attention.
To your body.
Your patterns.
Your reactions.
Your choices.
What makes you feel alive and what consistently makes you miserable.
That doesn’t mean we never need experts, teachers, doctors, farmers, herbalists, mechanics, clergy, researchers, or anybody else who knows something we don’t. We need each other. It means we don’t just automatically surrender our relationship with something simply because someone else has positioned themselves between us and it.
Somewhere along the way, we put middlemen between ourselves and almost everything.
Between us and our food.
Between us and our communities.
Between us and knowledge.
Between us and spirituality.
Between us and the people who make the things we buy.
Sometimes even between us and our own experience.
And then we called all that distance convenience. Convenience can certainly make life easier. But easier isn’t always better. Sometimes convenience costs us flavor. Sometimes it costs us connection. Sometimes it costs us knowledge. Sometimes it costs us community. And sometimes we don’t even realize what we’ve lost until we finally taste the real thing.
So grow something…..anything. Know somebody who grows something. Meet the maker. Ask the person directly. Read the source yourself. Sit beneath the tree. Have the uncomfortable conversation. Pay attention to yourself. Experience something before deciding what you’re supposed to think about it.
Remove the middleman whenever you can.
Because sometimes convenience isn’t progress….Sometimes convenience is simply distance with good marketing.