It’s springtime and for some of us, that means gardening.
But if you don’t have a green thumb then don’t worry because I’m not talking about veggies.
In the world of self-development, business, and life in general the horticultural metaphors grow like weeds, you can make connections all over the place.
The mind is a garden…
You reap what you sow…
You don’t see the growth under the surface…
Yada, yada.
It’s all good stuff but you have heard it before.
So in the interest of giving you something new I want to demonstrate this wisdom with a real “as seen in the wild example” by sharing one of the seeds that I planted a couple of seasons back and the fruit that it produced a little further down the line.
Ready?
Let's go.
A couple of years ago I joined a paid Facebook group for people starting e-commerce businesses. At the time I was planning on launching my own nutrition brand with a sort of one foot in one foot out approach which ultimately landed the project on the back burner (a story for another time).
So I didn't launch the brand but I did launch some relationships.
I participated in the group and reached out to people I could learn from simply because I was curious about and intrigued by what they were doing.
The indirect result of this was first and foremost some amazing new friends and mentors but also a whole slew of new opportunities.
About a year and a half after joining the group I was able to pull a few strings and launch into a side career (I have lots of these) of pretty lucrative freelance copywriting (the kind where you get paid more than a few cents a word).
At the time I joined the group I barely knew what “copywriting” was. I never planned to go down the road it just sort of “happened”.
But what I did plan and plant were some seeds.
I was not totally sure what I would harvest down the road (and in the end, I actually did not really reap specifically what I sowed) but I did throw those little guys in the ground anyways.
Steve Jobs once said that you can only connect the dots going backward and that is exactly how it usually goes with this sort of “entrepreneurial horticulture”.
You don’t always get to know what type of seeds you are planting but you can’t let that stop you from planting em.
So maybe it's time to think about your side hustle ideas or creativity like a bag of unlabeled seeds. That way you don’t need to worry about what you got, you just gotta start gardening with them and then see what grows!
So yea there is a lot we can learn from the wholesome tilling of soil, but maybe the most important thing is this: when things get planted they usually start to grow.
Watcha gonna plant?
Yours in the weeds and the seeds,
Ben
P.S. The Facebook group I mentioned above is still alive and well. It’s a community of entrepreneurs who want to sell real stuff to real people and create real change. It is not cheap but it is value-packed. The fearless leader of the group is Ryan Moran author of the must-read book “12 Months To One Million” If you want to start a business this book is a really great place to start.