I am a yes man. I’ve spent my career shouting that I am not such a man, but by the grace of God, I am.

Brian Bird taught me in a podcast interview that we need more yes men in our work. Brian is the executive producer of When Calls the Heart, a Hallmark family series, now in season 7. (Click here to to listen to the interview.)

Producing a turn-of-the-century family-oriented show with a modest budget is not easy. Viewers rarely set appointments with their televisions to watch families struggle for existence. The cast must live in a coal mining town, on the brink of an oil discovery, set in Hope Valley, Canada.

Romance graces the plot lines and town with handsome Mounties and beautiful women adorned in ankle length dresses. Their closets must surely be larger than the school house governed by the lovely widow, Elizabeth Thatcher (Erin Krakow).

Brian shared with me the difficulty of filming a period piece of interest to a G-rated audience. “There is a style that depicts historical ‘real’ and a style for historical ‘ideal,'” he said. Welcome to Hope Valley, home of a vision of what could be. The town is filled with toothpaste models, who have perfect hair and seemingly smell good too. Not easy in 1906.

But Brian’s lesson about all this is that people in that era were yes people. They figured things out with few resources and no opportunity to Google it. They survived and lived well if they could figure it out and get things done.

What a lesson for a start-up business or ministry. Say yes to every opportunity to move forward.

The pioneer way:

• Do what no one else is doing.
• Try new things and keep doing it until something works.
• Do something fast because winter is coming.
• Put a stake in the ground. It’s yours to grow.
• Play hurt. Modern man invented PTO.
• Do the work.
• Multitasking was a survival skill.

There are enough people around us to explain in great detail why a thing cannot be done. We all need more yes men to help us build.

Yes. Yes. Yes. A beautiful three-note chord.