5 Growing Lessons for Plants...And Your Business

Gardening brings soaring successes and crippling failures. We can't predict the weather, we can't control the floods, freezes, or storms. The only thing we can anticipate is the same excitement every time a new seedling germinates.

 Purple potato seedling, our first sprout of the growing season.

My recent seed spree reminds me of all of my various work projects. The seed is planted for each of my projects. I'm at the stage where I tend to each one daily. My patience for these projects have grown exponentially since I started gardening. Gardening gives daily lessons that you can apply to any kind of work.

1. Start Slowly & Start Small
Don't plant 100 seeds when you don't have a place to put them and/or the time to take care of them. Just like plants, small projects grow into larger ones quickly. Both your plants and your projects will wilt, languish, then die if you start too many and don't take care of them. Keep your numbers down to something you can manage and your plants and projects will flourish.

2. Make Small Steps Daily
It's easier to take small steps to improve your garden daily. Neglect your projects or your garden and you'll have a much harder time when the work piles up!

3. Stay Within Your Zone
Sometimes a plant will do well outside of its growing zone, but it will usually require extra hours of maintenance and care. Likewise, when you start projects in a field that you're not very skilled in, you have to put in painful extra hours. Stick to what you excel at and you'll have a much easier time with any project.

4. Patience!
You want food now! But you have to start with a tiny seed and nurture it for months before you get your pay off. My garden teaches me to do the same thing with my work. Take small steps toward the pay off.

5. Absorb the Lessons
Life is about making mistakes and learning from them. Take these mistakes with you as lessons, don't just learn them, ABSORB them and apply them to your new routine so you'll be successful next time.

Happy Earth Day!