Commentary

I’ve been an employer for most of my adult life. Across kitchens, fields, and small businesses, the hardest part has never been the work itself. It’s people. Payroll systems are predictable; human beings are not. When a tractor breaks, you fix it. When a team breaks, you face tangled feelings, assumptions, and old wounds that no spreadsheet can solve.

As artificial intelligence and robotics move deeper into daily life, I understand why many business owners are turning toward them. Machines don’t take offense or interpret tone. They don’t need reassurance or time off to process a disagreement. People do. And increasingly, we treat every bit of discomfort as harm and every disagreement as disrespect.

My father raised me differently. He would listen to my story—really listen—and then ask, “Is that belief serving you?” Sometimes he’d dismantle what I thought was bedrock truth and call it what it was: hogwash. He didn’t say my feelings were invalid; he just taught me they weren’t always right. That distinction has carried me through every season of leadership.

Today we’re teaching young people to treat every thought as sacred, as if whatever crosses their mind must be true. But it isn’t. I think unkind things all the time—it doesn’t mean I believe them. We can’t trust every story our minds tell. Every conversation is filtered through our past experiences, traumas, and assumptions. Those things are real, but they aren’t the whole truth.

I write about this in my book because it touches everything—family, faith, farming, and the fragile fabric of community. Somewhere along the way, we decided that discomfort was a problem to be solved instead of a normal part of being alive. But to be human is to be uncomfortable sometimes. In marriage, friendship, or business, there will always be friction. That doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong. Often it means something—or someone—is growing.

My father also taught me not to take things personally. People are rarely reacting to you; they’re reacting to their own stories. Yet we’re raising a generation to look for how they’ve been wronged, to find the angle where they’re the victim. Life isn’t fair. It never has been. But if you have food to eat, a roof over your head, and a little money in the bank, you’re among the luckiest people on earth.

When survival isn’t on the line, the mind invents problems. It finds things to be angry about and projects those frustrations onto others. The truth is, most of us wake up a little afraid and a little alone, even if we don’t admit it. We fill that ache with busyness and screens, but the only cure for it is courage.

So my advice to young people is this: do hard things on purpose. Your ancestors endured wars, famines, and unthinkable hardship, yet they carried life forward anyway. Every one of us is the result of generations who refused to quit. We are miracles, yes—but we are also built for struggle. When life becomes too easy, we create interpersonal drama to replace real difficulty.

I see this play out constantly as an employer. I’m far from perfect. I have four young children and multiple businesses, and I work long hours. I live in my head—solving problems and chasing ideas—which sometimes leaves my husband or my team feeling unseen. I’m working on that. But I’ve also noticed that in the absence of meaningful challenge, people invent problems. The focus shifts from productivity to personality. Someone always needs something to be upset about.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we all had to feed ourselves again—really feed ourselves. Would we give each other more grace if we depended on one another for survival? Would marriages last longer if we still needed each other the way our ancestors did? Would we be so quick to leave when things got uncomfortable?

We’ve elevated the individual “I” so high that we’ve forgotten how to rely on each other. Yet the best parts of life often come from staying—the hard conversations, the hard seasons, the hard work. Interdependence isn’t weakness; it’s what keeps a community alive.

And this, I think, is why employers will increasingly turn to AI and robotics—not because they dislike people, but because people have become the hardest part of the job. Machines don’t need empathy, boundaries, or encouragement. But that’s exactly why this shift worries me. A world with fewer human interactions might run smoother, but it will grow colder.

We have a choice to make in the rise of AI and robotics: will it destroy us—or simply reveal, more starkly, who we are?

That answer won’t come from technology. It will come from us—how we handle discomfort, take responsibility, and choose to grow through the friction of being human instead of running from it.

Because the hardest part of any business, any marriage, any relationship, has always been the same thing: us. And that’s exactly where the work must continue.

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