It’s important to enjoy the process when reaching any goal. Embrace the journey and become a master of discipline. Focusing only on the end result is driven by ego and can’t be maintained because growth isn’t happening. Lessons come from the journey, the missteps along the way, the insights gained from them, and the guides you encounter who redirect your path. This creates opportunities for genuine self-reflection and challenges your pride and prejudices.
Trust the Process
Let’s imagine we’re starting a tomato garden. You’d picture bright red tomatoes that are crispy to bite and bursting with flavorful juice inside. There’s nothing wrong with starting with the end in mind. Whether it’s bright red tomatoes or dark green collard leaves the size of an elephant’s ear, we still need to learn how to grow them properly. That is how you gain your green thumb!
We plant our seeds, water them, and let nature take its course. Hopefully, those seedlings will emerge from the soil, and that’s where the journey begins. From the moment those seedlings sprout until it’s time to harvest, we must nurture and cultivate to achieve the best possible outcome.
What does that mean? Watering on schedule, ensuring you’re using the right fertilizer, and monitoring how much sun they get are all ways we care for our plants in hopes of a good harvest. Just like in life, if you want better relationships or to learn a new skill, you have to put in the effort to nurture them so they can grow into something fruitful.
Will there be missteps along the way? Yes! But don’t get discouraged when challenges arise. View them as opportunities to learn and show yourself how resourceful you are. This is the time to fill your cracks with gold, because it’s the fire we go through that refines us.
Recognize the Sublime
One of the first things I noticed when I started growing tomatoes was that they were leaning toward the afternoon sun. They soaked up the sunlight every day, and the main stems began to bend in that direction. Who knew plants were aware of their environment! I started rotating my plants every couple of weeks after noticing this pattern to keep them growing straight.
“A knowledge of the battle of the tendencies within a plant is the very basis of all plant improvement…it is not that the work of plant improvement brings with it, incidentally, as people mistakenly think, a knowledge of these forces, it is the knowledge of these forces, rather, which makes plant improvement possible.”
Luther Burbank
Mistakes Mean You’re Learning
You can do all the research, water on a strict schedule, and use fertilizer specific to that plant during its growth phase, but failing to recognize the subliminal signals of your plants will hinder your development as a gardener. Everything that happens has a lesson if you’re willing to look for it. The worst thing that can happen to a first-time gardener is for everything to go perfectly. You didn’t face pest problems, blossom rot, or overwater a plant? Then what have you learned along the way?
Being more curious about the process than focusing solely on achieving results is essential to mastering any skill. When you stay curious about the process, the lessons you learn along the way become valuable data for producing consistent results later.
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