Wisdom from Landman: Lessons on the Oilpatch
Landman is an excellent tv series by the brilliant Taylor Sheridan about Tommy Norris played by Billy Bob Thornton in Midland of the beautiful state of Texas. A Landman takes care of leases and the work crews of fictional Oil Giant M-Tex, trying to get the oil & gas out of the ground. He is part COO, part fixer. All trouble. Or trouble shooter at least, having to deal with accidents, lawsuits, employee issues, theft & even drug smugglers.
He is wise and grizzled. When his daughter asks him: “How come you are always right?” He answers: “Cause I spent my life being wrong. I never forgot the lessons.”
His son Norris also works the patch. We see him get hazed by his colleagues on the crew on his first day. It’s rough work and probably normal. But he does alright. When Tommy asks the crew boss how his son does on the first day, the crew boss says: “He survived. Green, real green. But he don’t say no and he tries. I mean, that’s something.”
I love this. It’s something I rarely see especially in newbies in every place I’ve worked at. Real effort and crazy good work ethic. All I see most times is a lack of humility, entitlement, crazy expectations & thinking some work is beneath them. When you are new, you do everything asked of you and more. You have to be prepared to work. And work brutally hard. Grind. This is what I did and it’s gotten me pretty far because it’s really rare.
And as the series shows besides the grinding work, there is massive amounts of stress at all levels. This is for the frontline crews doing a dangerous job, the managers who rush from crisis to crisis. Even the big boss of M-Tex who may be super rich but literally has the massive pressure & weight of the business on him. Heavy lies the crown. The tycoon, like many tycoons, is a stress basket, especially the oil and gas business. “Our business is one of constant crises interrupted by brief periods of intense success.”
But the reason people are willing to put up with all this stress is explained by Norris’s new colleagues: “It’s better you work for it real hard. You know? That way, nobody can take it away.” Very good advice.
Tommy also gives great advice to his daughter:
“You gotta love your way through the failures. You never know you’re in the last one until you are in it.” Man, this is gold, it’s relevant for startups and relationships.
But outside the drama it highlights the importance of the oil industry, something we completely take for granted. Here are some stats as stated in the show:
“Oil and gas generates $3 billion dollars a day in pure profit. It’s the seventh largest industry in the world, ahead of food production, automobile production, coal mining and at 1.4 trillion, the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t crack the top ten.
The industries completely ahead of it are completely dependent on oil and gas. The more they grow, the more we grow. That’s the scale. That’s the size of this thing. And it’s only getting bigger.”
It is critical to a functional world economy. Heck, I’ll say to a functioning civilization. Energy is civilization and one cannot develop without access to it. With all the great prosperity and growth many of us, especially on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, seem to have forgotten and overlooked this fact. As we move into a world that focuses more on atoms than bits this understanding of the critical factor of energy and oil will be back in VERY clear focus.
Access to cheap energy is one of the key factors of national sovereignty besides manufacturing (ie. Making stuff) as well as a strong military. If you don’t have these three things in this new more competitive & brutal world, you are nowhere close to being independent and sovereign as many countries in the world are learning the hard way now.