Anke gets as excited as a kid whenever the “gold guys” come on DMAX. At least, that’s what we call them at home. Officially, the show is called Gold Rush, and the camera crews follow different gold miners in their everyday work.
There’s one of them who fascinates me in particular: Parker Schnabel. Parker is just 32 years young, and last season, he and his team pulled more than 10,000 ounces of gold out of the ground. 10,000 ounces. That’s almost 38 million euros. But what fascinates me even more than the value itself is what has to be moved to get to it. Dirt. A whole lot of dirt.
Everything the ground has to offer. Rocks, soil, mud and gravel. Huge excavators dig it out of the ground, gigantic trucks haul the stuff from A to B, and wash plants run nonstop to separate the gold from all that dirt. And you know what I noticed at some point? The gold miners don’t wake up in the morning saying: “Holy crap. Look at all that dirt again.” They keep their eyes on the gold. Of course, the dirt is very real. And positive thinking won’t make it disappear. The men and women still have to move it to reach their goal. But that means the dirt has a completely different meaning to a gold miner. To us, it would probably just look like a gigantic pile of useless earth. To Parker, it’s simply what’s still standing between him and his gold.
And you know what question just came to my mind? How much dirt is standing between you and your gold right now? Because everyday life rarely unfolds exactly the way we imagined it would. Your career. Your relationship. Or something else entirely. We even say things like, “What a mess.” So the dirt shows up automatically. The only question is: What are you looking at? The enormous pile in front of you? Or the gold behind it?
Just imagine Parker driving to his mine every morning, turning off the engine of his pickup, getting out and saying: “That’s just too much dirt for me.” We probably wouldn’t know his name today. But to be fair, Parker’s story started much earlier. And this is the part I especially love.
Parker was only five years old when he was already spending time at his grandfather John’s Big Nugget Mine. He grew up around gold mining, learned about the machinery as a child, and spent a lot of time by his grandfather’s side. Then, at just 16 years old, his grandfather handed him responsibility for the mine and a crew of grown men. Suddenly, this kid was running a gold mine.
But let’s go back in time for a moment. What do you think a five-year-old boy sees when he walks through a mine like that with his grandfather? Does he see dirt? Mud? Huge rocks? Or does he learn to see something completely different through his grandfather’s eyes? Gold. There’s gold out there. The question isn’t whether it’s there. Only where. Behind every bit of dirt, the big nugget could be waiting. And maybe that’s exactly one of the abilities we need in our own lives.
Look, the dirt is part of the journey. Something will always turn out differently than planned. Sometimes you’ll be disappointed. But what meaning do you give the dirt in that moment? Is it proof that you should throw everything away and give up? Or is it simply what’s still standing between you and your gold? If anyone could write a book about that, it’s me. Please don’t believe that every day of my life is filled with golden moments.
That’s exactly why it’s so important to me to consciously surround myself with people who remind me of the gold. In masterminds. At seminars and trainings. In conversations. And every Monday evening with our Caribbean Rebels. For me, that’s our positive filling station. Not because we tell each other there’s no dirt. But because we remind each other why we started digging in the first place. And there’s something about our Rebels that makes me especially happy. Many of them don’t wait until their lives become really difficult before they start changing something. They want more joy. More clarity. More of the things that feel like gold to them. And maybe that’s a pretty beautiful standard for your own life: Keep your eyes on the gold, even when there’s a whole lot of dirt in front of it.
And one more idea: Take the young people in your life on this journey with you. Maybe we don’t need to promise our children that their path will always be easy. But we can give them something far more valuable. The belief that behind a mountain of dirt, there may still be something worth digging for. I wish you a golden week.
