09/01/2026
Such an amazing post about ignoring the haters and pursuing what makes you happy!
WARNING this will be a very long one and has been written over weeks of happy days- sad days- angry days- and on days I just simply want to quit.
I’m going to pause the Coturnix education posts for a minute and talk about something a little more personal. Something I think a lot of people who put themselves out there online eventually have to learn the hard way. You cannot let people on the internet steal your happiness.
That sounds simple until you’re the one living it.
When we started raising quail, we weren’t experts. We weren’t some big farm with everything figured out. We were small, inexperienced hobby breeders trying to learn as much as we could. We made tons of mistakes daily. We learned what worked and what didn’t.
We stayed up late researching things most people probably wouldn’t care enough to read about. We hatched birds, raised them, watched them grow, took notes, changed our breeding groups, started over when something wasn’t right, and slowly began understanding what we wanted our farm to become.
There wasn’t some magical moment where Guidroz Family Farm suddenly appeared. It was built one bird, one pen, one hatch, one mistake, one lesson and one long night at a time. And somewhere along the way, this little hobby started turning into something much bigger.
The funny thing is, when you’re a kid and you dream about having a farm someday, you don’t really think about everything that comes with it-You picture the animals-You picture your family working together-You picture walking outside in the morning and realizing that the place around you belongs to something you built-You picture raising your kids around animals and teaching them responsibility-You picture building something that might still be here after you’re gone.
BUT you don’t picture strangers on Facebook having an opinion about your character. You don’t picture people taking screenshots of things you say and twisting them. You don’t picture people rooting for you to fail simply because you became successful. You definitely don’t picture people who have never sat at your kitchen table, never walked through your pens, never paid one of your feed bills, never packed one of your orders and never lived a single day of your life somehow becoming experts on who you are.
That is part of putting yourself out there, and I’m still learning how to deal with it. There have been plenty of naysayers along the way. People who said certain things wouldn’t work, who laughed at ideas, who questioned why we were putting so much time and money into “just quail”, who thought we were crazy for wanting to grow, who told us there was no way we could build what we were trying to build.
Then, when things started working, some of the criticism changed. Suddenly it wasn’t, “You’ll never make it”, It became, “You think you’re better than everybody.” It became assumptions, Rumors, Half-truths, People picking apart posts, pictures, prices, birds, business decisions and sometimes our family. If you’re not careful, that stuff will get inside your head.
You can have 500 people tell you they appreciate something you taught them, and somehow the one hateful comment is the one you think about when you go to bed.
You can have customers send pictures of beautiful birds they raised from your genetics, families tell you that you helped them start their first flock, kids excited about their first hatch, and people thanking you for answering a question…
…and somehow one person sitting behind a phone who has already decided they don’t like you can make you forget all of it for a few minutes.
That’s the dangerous part.
Because internet trolls normally aren’t trying to change your mind. They’re trying to change your mood. They want your attention. They want a reaction. They want you irritated enough that you stop enjoying the thing you worked so hard to build.
And I’ve realized something lately, I refuse to give somebody that kind of power over my life.
Guidroz Family Farm was a dream before anybody on social media knew our name.
It was ours when we only had a handful of birds.
It was ours when nobody was watching.
It was ours when we were learning.
It was ours when we were struggling.
It was ours when we were standing outside sweating, covered in dust and feathers, wondering what in the world we had gotten ourselves into. And it is still ours today.
This farm means more to us than numbers on a screen. It represents years of work. It represents sacrifices most people will never see. It represents mornings when we were exhausted but animals still needed us. It represents nights when everybody else was asleep and we were still working. It represents failed ideas that taught us better ones. It represents birds we were incredibly proud of and birds that taught us we still had work to do. It represents our family.
And probably more than anything, it represents the fact that something we dreamed about when we were younger actually became real.
That is pretty incredible when you really think about it.
There was a time when this life only existed in our imagination.
Now we wake up and live it. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. There are stressful days. There are expensive days. There are heartbreaking days. There are times when orders pile up, equipment breaks, birds don’t cooperate, weather causes problems, messages never stop coming and you wonder how you’re going to fit 30 hours worth of work into 24. But even on those days, I wouldn’t trade this life.
And I definitely won’t allow someone who contributes nothing to it to convince me not to enjoy it. That’s something I hope anybody reading this remembers about their own life too.
Whether you’re building a farm, a business, a career, raising a family, losing weight, going back to school, starting over or chasing some crazy dream everybody around you thinks is impossible…
People will talk.
They’ll talk when you’re struggling.
They’ll talk when you start succeeding.
They’ll talk when you’re quiet.
They’ll talk when you defend yourself.
Some people will misunderstand you accidentally.
Some people will misunderstand you intentionally.
You will never explain yourself enough to satisfy somebody who is committed to seeing the worst in you. So eventually you have to stop trying.
Protect your peace.
Listen to legitimate criticism when it can make you better.
Own your mistakes when you make them.
Keep learning.
Keep improving.
But learn the difference between constructive criticism and somebody simply trying to make you miserable. Not every comment deserves an answer. Not every rumor deserves a response.
Not every person deserves access to you. Sometimes the healthiest response is closing the phone, walking outside and looking at the life you actually built.
That’s what I’m trying to do more often.
Because when I walk through our farm, I don’t see the comments. I see years of memories.
I see birds that came from generations of careful breeding. I see projects that started as conversations around our kitchen table.I see our family working together. I see lessons learned the hard way.I see goals we haven’t reached yet.And I see the dream that two inexperienced hobby breeders once hoped might become something someday.
Guidroz Family Farm.
Our dream since we were literal kids.
Still growing
Still learning
Still making mistakes
Still improving
Still here
There will always be somebody who doesn’t like what you’re doing.
There will always be somebody who thinks they could do it better.
There will always be somebody waiting for you to stumble.
Let them wait.
We have animals to feed, kids to raise, dreams to chase and a farm to build.
Life is way too short to hand your happiness over to a stranger with a keyboard.
So to everybody who has supported us, encouraged us, bought birds or eggs from us, shared our posts, defended us when we weren’t in the room, asked questions, taught us something, celebrated our wins or simply followed along while this crazy little dream grew…
Thank you.
You are the reason I remind myself that the loudest voices on the internet are not always the majority.
We never really had the goal of growing this page past a few local friends and family, but we are here now and here to stay. So, please, Like, Follow and share with your friends. You know hitting the invite all helps us tremendously.
Peace and Love thy neighbor, if you can’t love them then hit them in the face with a shovel.
