This week we come to movie ranches whose stories don’t provide enough history to make a meaningful post, which means we are at the end of this series. The question, what comes next? We need direction. I’m a little stumped so I’d like to hear from you. Any ideas on where we might go next? Let me know. Research has the final say on what works.

My best recollection is we have been doing these weekly posts for something like fifteen years. In all I recall repeating two series. The Cowboy Code, because it was wildly popular – 60K views both times; and Patent Medicine because the humor was fun. I took a look back at the Cowboy Code series, because it is timeless. As relevant today as it was ten years ago when we last ran it. So, lets freshen it up for a revisit while we find a way forward.

I first looked into the Cowboy Code, or Code of the West as some call it, more than a decade ago for a talk I was invited to give to a group of at-risk middle school kids learning life lessons through equine skills. Research discovered there are many versions of ten things that make up a cowboy way of doing things. I combined the best of eight lists to come up with the version of ten we’ll test against today’s digital culture.

The cowboy way of doing things offers all of us life lessons we can use to navigate the cultural turbulence we find ourselves in today. You don’t have to be a cowboy to benefit from the cowboy code. Cowboys aren’t defined by boots and hats, or horses and cattle. The things that make a cowboy come from the heart. Those who learn the code and live it find there’s a little cowboy in all of us. With that in mind let’s use this post series to examine values that make up a cowboy way of doing things. If you’ve got a young person, you’d like to share these musings with, feel free. They don’t have to be at-risk kids to benefit from positive life lessons.

Next Week: Cowboys Tell the Truth
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Ride easy,
Paul