In the spring of 1970, the air on a dirt road outside of Lamar, Missouri, carried the heavy, rich scent of freshly turned earth and the impending heat of the coming afternoon. A John Deere dealer named Curtis Vance pulled his truck to the side of the road, the gravel crunching beneath his tires, and sat in stunned silence as he watched something he could scarcely believe. A man was out in the field, laboring with a pair of mules. It wasn’t a tractor; it wasn’t even an old, rusted-out machine from decades past. It was two actual, living mules hitched to an actual plow, cutting through the soil with the same deliberate, rhythmic effort that farmers had employed for a hundred years prior.
Curtis sat in his truck for a full minute, his eyes tracking the slow, steady movement of the animals. Then, a bewildered, sharp laugh escaped him. He was still laughing, the sound echoing in the cab, when he pulled into the feed store twenty minutes later, eager to share the absurdity of the moment. He slapped his hand against the counter, drawing the attention of the men gathered there.
“You won’t believe it,” Curtis said, his voice brimming with disbelief. “Old Earl Wulmeck is out there plowing with mules. Mules in 1970. I thought I’d driven through a time warp.”
The men at the counter laughed in response, a chorus of skepticism and amusement. They all knew Earl Wulmeck. They knew his hundred and twenty acres on the south edge of the county, they knew his quiet, reserved ways, and they certainly knew he had never quite managed to join the twentieth century.
“That’s just Earl for you,” one of the farmers remarked, shaking his head. “Stubborn as his own mules.”
“Stubborn is one word for it,” Curtis said, his smile fading into a frown. “I’ve got another word. Embarrassing. This is 1970. We’ve got men on the moon, and Earl Wulmeck is farming with animals like it’s 1870.”
“You try selling him a tractor?” someone asked from the corner.
“Try?” Curtis scoffed. “I’ve been trying for ten years. He comes into the showroom, looks at everything, asks questions, nods his head, and then goes home to his mules.” Curtis shook his head in disgust. “Some people just can’t be helped.”
“Maybe he can’t afford it,” another man suggested, offering a bit of sympathy.
“Earl Wulmeck? He’s got money,” Curtis countered. “His daddy left him that farm free and clear, and he’s been working it for thirty years. He could buy a new 4020 cash if he wanted to.”
Curtis leaned in closer, lowering his voice as if sharing a conspiratorial secret. “You know what I think? I think he’s scared. Scared of progress. Scared of change. Scared of admitting that the old ways are dead.”
The men nodded sagely, the explanation fitting their perception of Earl perfectly. It made sense to them; Earl Wulmeck was afraid of the future. What none of them knew—what nobody in Barton County knew—was that Earl Wulmeck held a secret, and that secret was destined to make him the wealthiest farmer in the entire county.
To understand what Earl was doing with those mules, you have to understand where he came from. Earl was born in 1915, in the very same farmhouse where he still lived. His father, Cornelius Wulmeck, had worked that land with mules—a matched pair named Solomon and Sheba—from the day he bought the property in 1898 until the day he died in 1941. Earl grew up behind those mules; he learned to plow before he learned to drive a car. He could read the subtle twitch of a mule’s ear far better than he could read a newspaper. By the time he was fifteen, he knew everything there was to know about working the land with animal power.
Then, the war arrived. Earl enlisted in January 1942, just a month after Pearl Harbor. He was twenty-six years old, strong as oak, and ready to serve his country. The Army, upon reviewing his background, assigned him to the Transportation Corps—not to drive trucks, but to handle the mules. The Army still utilized mules in great numbers. In the mountains of Italy, where trucks foundered and failed, mule trains carried essential supplies to troops fighting in terrain that hadn’t changed much since the Roman legions marched through centuries before.
Earl spent two years in those mountains, guiding mule trains through treacherous paths where a single wrong step meant death, and where the difference between a good mule and a bad one was measured in human lives. He witnessed things in those mountains that he would never speak of afterward. But he also learned invaluable lessons—lessons that would define the trajectory of the rest of his life.
The first lesson was simple: Mules don’t need gasoline. It sounds obvious when spoken aloud, but Earl had watched supply lines stretch and break. He had seen trucks abandoned on the side of the road, left to rust for lack of fuel. He had witnessed entire military operations grind to a halt because the gas didn’t arrive on time. Through it all, the mules kept walking. They ate grass, hay, and oats—things that grew from the ground and didn’t have to be shipped across an ocean. They could survive on forage that would starve a horse, and they could work in temperatures cold enough to freeze a truck’s engine solid. When Earl returned home in 1945, that lesson returned with him.
The second lesson was harder to explain. It was a lesson about planning, patience, and the ability to think ten moves ahead while everyone else was focused on the immediate present. In the mountains of Italy, Earl had learned that the man who survived wasn’t necessarily the strongest or the fastest; it was the man who anticipated what was coming before it arrived. That lesson would take twenty-five years to yield its fruit.
When Earl returned home from the war, his father had been dead for four years, and the farm was waiting. The mules—a new pair, not Solomon and Sheba—were still there, maintained by a neighbor who had kept things running in exchange for a share of the crop. Most of the returning veterans were eager to modernize. The war had introduced them to machines—trucks, jeeps, tanks—and they returned home wanting to leave the old ways behind. Tractors were becoming cheaper, more reliable, and more available. The future was clearly defined by internal combustion, and everyone knew it.
Earl bought a tractor, which surprised the locals. They had expected the stubborn mule to stick to his animals. But in the fall of 1946, Earl Wulmeck drove a brand-new Farmall M onto his property, parked it in his barn, and for a few months, he became the talk of the county.
“Even Earl’s finally joining the modern age,” people said.
What they didn’t see was what Earl did next. He used the tractor for exactly one season. He learned exactly how it worked, how much fuel it consumed, and how much maintenance it required. He kept meticulous records—every gallon of gas, every hour of operation, every repair and replacement part. Then, in the spring of 1947, he parked the Farmall in his barn, covered it with a tarp, and went back to his mules.
People thought he was crazy. They assumed the tractor had broken down and he couldn’t afford to fix it. They assumed he had tried modern farming and failed. Earl let them think whatever they wanted. He had a plan. Every year, while his neighbors bought bigger tractors and consumed more fuel, Earl continued to work with his mules. And every year, he took the money he would have spent on gasoline, diesel, and repairs, and he deposited it into a savings account at the Lamar Farmers Bank.
By 1955, he had saved enough to buy a better tractor: a Farmall 400, the most advanced model International Harvester made at the time. He paid cash, drove it home, and parked it in his barn next to the old Farmall M. Then, he went back to his mules. By 1960, he had two tractors in his barn, both meticulously maintained and ready to run, yet he was still farming with Jack and Jenny, the mule team he’d bought in 1952, named after his wartime mules in Italy.
It is necessary to pause and explain Earl’s thinking, because from the outside, it looked like madness. Earl Wulmeck was not against tractors. He understood their advantages—the power, the speed, and the efficiency. He knew that a man with a tractor could work more land in less time than a man with mules. But Earl also understood something his neighbors failed to grasp. He understood that tractors ran on oil, and oil came from far away—from Texas, from the Middle East, from places that Earl couldn’t control and couldn’t predict. The price of gasoline in 1970 had nothing to do with how hard Earl worked or how smart he farmed. It was determined by men in suits in cities he had never visited, making decisions he would never understand.
Mules were different. Mules ate hay that grew in Earl’s own fields. Mules drank water from Earl’s own well. Mules produced manure that fertilized Earl’s own soil. The cost of running a mule was almost entirely under Earl’s control. More than that, mules reproduced. If Jenny had a foal, Earl had another mule for free. If his tractor broke down, he had to buy parts from a factory in Indiana. If his mule got sick, he called the veterinarian in Lamar, or he nursed the animal himself with knowledge passed down from his father.
Earl had done the math. Over a twenty-year period, assuming stable fuel prices, a tractor was more economical than mules. But Earl didn’t trust stable fuel prices. He remembered the war. He remembered supply lines breaking. He remembered what happened when the fuel didn’t arrive. So, he kept his mules, he kept his tractors in the barn, and he waited.
Curtis Vance, the John Deere dealer, played an important role in this story. He had been trying to sell Earl Wulmeck a tractor for fifteen years. Every spring, Earl would stop by the showroom, look at the new models, ask detailed questions about fuel consumption and maintenance schedules, and then leave without buying anything. It drove Curtis crazy.
“I don’t understand you, Earl,” Curtis said one afternoon in 1968, after Earl had spent an hour examining a new 4020 and then headed for the door. “You’ve got the money, you’ve got the land. Why are you still fooling around with those mules?”
Earl considered the question. He liked Curtis in a way; the man was persistent, and there was something to admire in that. “You ever been to war, Curtis?”
Curtis shifted uncomfortably. “No. Bad knee kept me out.”
“I was in Italy,” Earl said. “Mountains, supply corps. You know what I learned over there? I learned that the man with the longest supply line is the man who loses. Doesn’t matter how good your equipment is if you can’t feed it.”
“This isn’t a war, Earl. This is farming.”
“Same principle,” Earl replied. He tapped the hood of the 4020. “This machine is better than my mules. Faster, stronger, more efficient, but it’s got a supply line three thousand miles long. My mules eat grass that grows in my own pasture.”
Curtis laughed. “Earl, we’re not going to run out of gasoline. This is America. We’ve got more oil than we know what to do with.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Earl said, heading for the door. “I’ll tell you what, Curtis. If you’re right, if gasoline stays cheap forever, then I’m a fool and everyone can laugh at me. But if I’m right…” He paused at the doorway. “Well, we’ll see who’s laughing then.”
He walked out, leaving Curtis shaking his head in disbelief. “Crazy old mule,” Curtis muttered. The nickname stuck. Within a year, everyone in Barton County was calling Earl “Old Mule Earl” or just “Stubborn Mule.” They meant it as an insult, but Earl didn’t mind. He had been called worse things in Italy.
Then came 1973, and that was when Earl’s patience started to pay off. In October 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries announced an oil embargo against the United States. The reason was political retaliation for American support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War, but the effect was economic devastation. Within weeks, gasoline prices doubled. Then, they doubled again. Service stations ran dry. Lines stretched around the blocks. The American economy, built on cheap and abundant oil, suddenly discovered what it felt like when the supply line broke.
For farmers, the crisis was catastrophic. Everything in modern agriculture ran on petroleum. Tractors burned diesel. Trucks burned gasoline. Fertilizers were made from natural gas. The combines that harvested the crops, the trains that shipped the grain, the processing plants that turned wheat into flour—all of it depended on oil. When oil prices spiked, farming costs spiked with them.
Earl’s neighbors watched their profit margins evaporate overnight. The fuel that had cost them thirty cents a gallon in January was costing sixty cents by December. Their carefully planned budgets, based on years of stable prices, were suddenly worthless. Earl Wulmeck’s costs didn’t change at all. Jack and Jenny still ate hay. They still drank well water. They still pulled the plow at the same steady pace they had always pulled it, burning nothing but oats and grass.
“How are you managing, Earl?” one of his neighbors asked that winter, when everyone was gathered at the feed store, comparing horror stories. “Fuel costs must be killing you.”
“Don’t use much fuel,” Earl said.
The room went quiet. Everyone knew Earl used mules. Everyone had laughed at him for it. But suddenly, in December 1973, with gasoline at sixty cents and climbing, nobody was laughing.
“You serious?” another farmer asked. “You’re still using those mules?”
“Mules don’t need gasoline,” Earl replied. “But your tractor don’t use the tractor much either.”
The farmers looked at each other. For fifteen years, they had pitied Earl Wulmeck, mocked him, called him backward and stubborn, and accused him of being afraid of progress. Now, suddenly, they weren’t sure who the fool was.
The oil crisis was just the beginning. The embargo ended in March 1974, but gasoline prices never returned to what they had been. The days of thirty-cent fuel were gone forever. The new normal was fifty cents, sixty cents, eventually a dollar and more. Earl’s neighbors adapted; they had to. They found ways to use less fuel, to combine trips, and to stretch every gallon. They complained constantly about costs, about margins, about the government, the Arabs, and the oil companies. Earl just kept working his mules.
But something had changed in how people looked at him. The mockery had faded, replaced by something that might have been respect, or at least grudging curiosity. Curtis Vance, the John Deere dealer, stopped trying to sell Earl a tractor. He even started asking Earl questions about mule husbandry—hypothetically, of course, just out of curiosity, nothing serious.
“Hypothetically,” Curtis said one afternoon in 1976, “if someone wanted to get a mule team going, how would they start?”
Earl smiled. It was the first time Curtis had ever seen him smile. “Hypothetically, they’d start by finding a good pair of mules. Young, but trained. Then they’d need a harness, a plow, a cultivator, and they’d need patience. Can’t rush a mule.”
“How much would all that cost?”
“Hypothetically, less than a tractor. A lot less.” Earl paused. “But it wouldn’t help you, Curtis. Not now.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’d have to learn. Takes years to learn to work a mule team properly. And you’d have to slow down. Mules don’t go fast. They go steady.” Earl looked at Curtis, and there was something almost kind in his eyes. “You’re not built for slow and steady, Curtis. You’re built for fast and new. Nothing wrong with that. Just means mules aren’t for you.”
Curtis didn’t buy any mules, but he remembered that conversation. Then came 1979, and that was when everything changed. The Iranian Revolution began in January. By the year’s end, the Shah had fled, Ayatollah Khomeini had taken power, and oil prices had tripled. Triple gasoline that had cost sixty cents in 1978 was suddenly costing a dollar eighty. Diesel, the lifeblood of farm tractors, went from fifty cents to nearly a dollar and fifty cents. The fuel costs that had strained farm budgets in 1973 now threatened to destroy them entirely.
Earl’s neighbors were desperate. They had mortgages to pay, loans coming due, and families to feed. But every time they filled their tractors, they watched their profits drain away into the gas tank.
“I’m burning money,” Dale Hoskins complained at the feed store that summer. Dale had the biggest operation in the county: six hundred acres, three tractors, a combine, the works. He had expanded aggressively in the early seventies, borrowing against his land to buy more land and more equipment. “Every gallon of diesel costs me a dollar forty. Do you know what that does to my margins?”
“Same for everyone,” another farmer said. “We’re all bleeding.”
“Not everyone,” Dale’s voice was bitter. “Earl Wulmeck’s doing fine. Saw him out there yesterday with his mules, plowing away like it was 1870. No fuel costs, no problems. Lucky bastard.”
“Luck, nothing,” someone else said. “He knew.”
Dale shook his head. “We all laughed at him. Called him ‘Stubborn Mule.’ But he knew this was coming.”
“Nobody knew this was coming,” the other farmer argued.
“Earl did,” Dale insisted. “Or at least he planned like it might.” Dale stared out the window at the gas station across the street, where the price signs showed numbers that would have seemed impossible five years ago. “We all thought he was crazy. Turns out, he was the only sane one.”
On a September evening in 1979, Earl Wulmeck walked into his barn and pulled the tarp off his 1955 Farmall 400. He hadn’t started it in six months; he hadn’t driven it in over a year, but he had maintained it like he maintained everything. The oil was changed regularly, the battery was charged, and the fuel system was preserved against corrosion. The tractor was twenty-four years old, but it looked as if it could roll off the dealership lot tomorrow.
Earl climbed into the seat and turned the key. The engine caught on the first try, rumbling to life with the sound of four decades of engineering. He sat there for a while, letting it idle, feeling the vibration through the seat. He had owned this tractor for twenty-four years. He had used it maybe thirty times for jobs that the mules couldn’t handle, mostly pulling stumps or moving heavy equipment. The rest of the time, it had sat here, waiting. Waiting for what? Earl had never been entirely sure. He just knew that someday, the wait would be over. Now, he knew.
The next morning, Earl drove to the Lamar Farmers Bank and asked to speak with the loan officer. “I want to buy some land,” Earl said.
The loan officer blinked. Earl Wulmeck had never borrowed money in his life. His father had left him the farm free and clear, and Earl had kept it that way for thirty-four years. “What land?”
“The Hoskins place. Heard Dale might be selling.”
The loan officer shifted uncomfortably. Dale Hoskins hadn’t announced anything publicly, but the bank knew the truth. Dale’s operation was hemorrhaging money. The fuel costs, combined with the loans he had taken to expand, were crushing him. He couldn’t make his payments.
“I’m not sure the Hoskins property is available, Mr. Wulmeck.”
“It will be,” Earl’s voice was calm. “Six months, a year at most. When it is, I want to be ready.”
“Do you have funds for a purchase of that size?”
Earl reached into his jacket and pulled out a bank book. He slid it across the desk. The loan officer opened it. His eyes widened. Earl Wulmeck had one hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars in his savings account. One hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars saved over thirty-three years. While his neighbors were spending money on fuel, equipment, and expansion—while they were laughing at his mules and calling him crazy—Earl had been stacking cash.
“That’s a substantial sum, Mr. Wulmeck.”
“Should be enough for a down payment on the Hoskins place. Maybe enough to buy it outright, depending on what Dale’s willing to take.”
The loan officer stared at the bank book, then at Earl, then back at the bank book. “You planned this,” he said slowly. “All those years with the mules, you were saving for this.”
Earl smiled. That same quiet smile he’d shown Curtis Vance back in 1968. “I was planning for whatever came,” he said. “Just so happens this is what came.”
The next three years were when Earl’s patience finally paid off in full. Dale Hoskins declared bankruptcy in the spring of 1982. His six hundred acres went to auction, along with his three tractors, his combine, and everything else he had borrowed money to buy. Earl Wulmeck was there, bank book in his pocket. He didn’t buy the whole six hundred acres; that would have been more than he could work, even with both tractors running. He bought two hundred acres, the piece that bordered his own land, for one hundred and eighty dollars an acre—cash.
Curtis Vance was at the auction, too. He wasn’t buying anything. His dealership was struggling, crushed between falling sales and rising costs. He was there to watch, like half the county. When Earl raised his hand for the final bid, Curtis started to laugh, but it wasn’t the same laugh as before. It was something else—admiration, perhaps, or the dark humor of a man watching his own worldview collapse.
“You crazy old mule,” Curtis said as Earl went to sign the papers. “You actually did it.”
“Did what?”
“Outlasted all of us. Sitting there with your mules while we borrowed and expanded and modernized ourselves right into bankruptcy.” Curtis shook his head. “You knew, didn’t you? All those years. You knew something like this would happen.”
“Didn’t know,” Earl said. “Suspected. Planned for the possibility.” He looked at Curtis, at the man who had spent fifteen years calling him backward, stubborn, and afraid of progress. “You can’t predict the future, Curtis, but you can prepare for it. The man with no debt and no fuel costs can survive things that break everyone else. The mules. The mules, the savings, and the patience.”
Earl signed the last of the auction papers and tucked the deed into his pocket. Mostly, the patience. Over the next three years, Earl bought two more properties from neighbors who couldn’t make their payments. He never paid more than he could afford, never borrowed a dime, and never overextended himself. By 1983, he owned four hundred and fifty acres—nearly four times what he had started with—and he started using his tractors.
With four hundred and fifty acres to work, mules weren’t practical anymore. Earl finally pulled the covers off both Farmalls—the old M from 1946 and the 400 from 1955—and put them to work full-time. People in town noticed; they talked. “Earl finally joined the twentieth century,” they said. “Only took him forty years.”
Earl didn’t bother explaining. He had waited until fuel prices stabilized, until his neighbors were too broke to compete, until land was cheap and his savings were fat. Then, and only then, had he started using the tractors he had owned for decades. The mules—Jack had died in 1978, and Jenny in 1981—were retired to a pasture on the original one hundred and twenty acres. Earl visited them every day until they passed. Then, he buried them next to his father in the family cemetery behind the farmhouse. He didn’t buy new mules. That chapter was closed, but he never forgot what they had taught him.
Curtis Vance’s story had an ending, too. The John Deere dealership in Lamar closed in 1983. Curtis had fought to keep it open, but the math was impossible. Nobody was buying new tractors. Nobody could afford them. The dealership that had been the pride of the county for twenty-five years became another victim of the crisis. Curtis was sixty-two years old, unemployed, and facing the prospect of starting over.
On a winter morning in 1983, he drove out to Earl Wulmeck’s farm. He wasn’t sure why—maybe to apologize, maybe to ask for advice, maybe just to see how the “crazy old mule” had ended up winning. Earl was in his barn, working on the Farmall 400. Even with four hundred and fifty acres to manage, he still did his own maintenance. Some habits never changed.
“Curtis,” Earl looked up from the engine. “Didn’t expect to see you out here.”
“Yeah. Well,” Curtis shuffled his feet. “Heard you’re the biggest operator in the county now. Figured I should come pay my respects.”
“Respects?”
“You won, Earl. Whatever game you were playing, you won.” Curtis leaned against the barn door, looking old and tired. “I spent fifteen years trying to sell you a tractor, telling you that mules were obsolete, that you needed to modernize, that you were embarrassing yourself—and the whole time, you were planning for something like this.”
“Wasn’t planning for anything specific,” Earl said. “Just preparing for possibilities.”
“Same thing, isn’t it?”
Earl considered that. “Maybe. The war taught me that supplies run out, that the man who depends on things he can’t control is the man who loses. The mules were my way of staying independent.” He paused. “The tractors in the barn were my way of staying ready.”
Curtis nodded slowly. “You had them the whole time. The 400, the old M. Just sitting there, just waiting. Like me.”
“For what?”
“For the right moment.”
Earl wiped his hands on a rag and walked over to stand beside Curtis. “You know what the Army taught me about strategy? It taught me that battles aren’t won by the man with the best equipment or the most supplies. They’re won by the man who picks the right moment to act. The man who waits while everyone else is rushing around, and then moves when the time is right.”
“And the time is right now.”
“The time was right three years ago. Land was cheap, fuel prices were stabilizing, and I had money when nobody else did.” Earl looked out at his fields. Four hundred and fifty acres now. Four times what his father had left him. “The mules got me here. The patience kept me solvent. And the tractors,” he patted the hood of the Farmall 400, “the tractors let me take advantage of the opportunity.”
Curtis was quiet for a long moment. Then he laughed—a genuine laugh, not the mocking kind he’d used for years. “You know what, Earl? I spent my whole career selling people the idea that newer was better. That progress meant buying the latest model every year, forever. And here you are with a tractor from 1955 and land from neighbors who believed what I was selling.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Curtis. You believed it, too.”
“Yeah, I did.” Curtis pushed himself off the door frame. “What are you going to do with all this land?”
“Farm it. Same as always. Maybe hire some help when I get too old to manage it all myself.” Earl smiled. “Won’t be buying any new tractors, though. These two will last as long as I need them. They’re almost forty years old, and they run fine. Just like me.”
Curtis laughed again. He shook Earl’s hand, climbed back into his truck, and drove away. He never called Earl “Stubborn Mule” again. None of them did.
Earl Wulmeck died in 1998 at the age of eighty-three. He worked his land until the last year of his life, finally slowing down when his body demanded it. His will was simple. The land, now five hundred and twenty acres—expanded one last time with a purchase in 1991—went to his nephew’s son, Thomas Wulmeck. The tractors went with it, both the old Farmall M and the Farmall 400 still running, both of them still maintained to Earl’s exacting standards.
Thomas farms the land to this day. He uses modern equipment now—a 2015 John Deere that Earl would have admired for its engineering, if not its price. But in the barn, under tarps, sit the two old Farmalls. Thomas starts them every spring, just to hear them run, just to remember.
There is a photograph in the farmhouse, hung over the fireplace. It shows Earl in 1970, standing behind Jack and Jenny, working the fields while men in the background point and laugh. Earl is smiling in that photograph—a small, knowing smile, the smile of a man who sees something others don’t. Below the photograph, in a frame, is a handwritten note. Thomas found it in Earl’s papers after he died. A note Earl had written to himself sometime in the 1970s.
It reads: “They will laugh at the man with mules. Let them. The man who controls his own supplies controls his own fate. The man who waits for the right moment wins the war, not the battle. Be patient. Be ready. And when the time comes, act.”
That was Earl Wulmeck’s secret. Not the mules, exactly, or the hidden tractors, or even the money he had saved. The secret was simpler and harder than all of those things. The secret was patience: the willingness to be laughed at while waiting for the world to prove him right. Most people can’t do that. Most people need to be right immediately, visibly, and publicly. They need validation. They need to keep up with the neighbors, to own the latest equipment, to prove their success with things they can show.
Earl Wulmeck didn’t need any of that. He needed only to know in his own heart that his plan was sound, and he was willing to wait thirty years to see it proven. That is the real lesson of this story. It is not that mules are better than tractors—they aren’t, for most purposes. It is not that new things are bad—they are often better than old things. Not even that debt is always wrong; sometimes, borrowing makes sense. The lesson is simpler: Know what you’re planning for. Prepare for possibilities, and have the patience to wait for your moment.
The men who laughed at Earl Wulmeck in 1970 were laughing at someone they didn’t understand. They saw a backward farmer afraid of change, clinging to the past. What they didn’t see was a strategist. A man who understood supply lines and fuel costs and the vulnerability of systems that depend on things you can’t control. A man who kept two tractors hidden in his barn, waiting for the day when everyone else’s weakness would become his opportunity. They called him “Stubborn Mule.” He earned the name.
