The farmer looked across his land at his various fields. He made a lot of money last year. With the earnings he purchased more fields for planting corn. He now had twenty fields in various locations across the county. He was very excited for this year’s harvest.

The farmer new that he was going to be busy with all the fields he needed to care for, but he was certain that he could care for all of them. The first thing the farmer needed to do was to plow the field. He had to turn up the soil, before he could plant the seeds. He decided that he would split up his work equally among all the fields.

The farmer wanted to plow one line in each field until he had a single line plowed in all twenty fields. Then he would return to the first field and plow the second line. After he plowed the second line in the first field, he would then plow the second line in all twenty of the other fields. The farmer wanted to continue this pattern until the fields were entirely clean of weeds and ready to plant.

At first the plan went very well. The farmer plowed the first row in all twenty fields and the row looked very nice and weed free. The plan started to unravel when the farmer started plowing row eighty. By the time the farmer arrived at row eighty he looked back on row one and noticed that the weeds were starting to grow again. Because the field wasn’t entirely plowed, he hadn’t started planting. The bare soil in row one had given room for weeds to grow.

The farmer continued withs the same plan but worked faster at it. He stayed up late into the night and woke up early in the morning. He became very proficient in moving his tractor from one field to the next. However, no matter how fast and how many hours the farmer worked, he could not finish plowing all the rows, before weeds would spring up on the first rows.

The farmer was very discouraged. He couldn’t understand why he was failing. He knew he was a good farmer. He was able to be very successful during last year’s season when he only had one field to plant. He couldn’t understand why this season was different.

The farmer was very discouraged. Frustration welled up inside of him. He decided that he wasn’t good at farming. He accepted defeat. He sold his fields and never tried farming again.