So I was watching this cool documentary on the Gold Rush in California during the late 1840’s and 1850’s and heard a really good quote.
They were spotlighting these three brothers who had come up to San Francisco from Chile to make their fortune. After failing at the mines and then losing their hotel to one of the San Francisco fires they boarded a ship to return to Chile.
The one brother wrote a letter to their mom and said:
“We went looking for wool and came back shorn.”
I love the conciseness of the statement and the imagery. It also dovetails with a lot of my thinking lately about the individualistic nature of American culture. So many of us go running around looking for our big win and to define ourselves — and often, come back shorn.
