I enjoy watching my tomato plants grow in the garden. It’s amazing to see the progress from day to day. Once, I noticed a plant was branching out into an open area to collect more sunlight. It had two pieces of fruit starting to ripen at end of the branch.
The next day we had high wind gusts, and when I was watering them, I noticed how the plant was now leaning over with its new branch broken. This made me think.
The plant branched out and grew fruit without any hesitation of potential high winds. Sometimes in business, we strive for growth, plan, and do the work, but still get poor results, just like this tomato plant.
Here are some tough breaks I have experienced
- Creating a landing page, email, workflow, sending an email to a segmented list of a few thousand, and getting only one signup.
- After a good sales meeting, you craft a proposal and pricing, send it and then hear nothing back.
- Spending weeks on a HubSpot marketplace theme you think will sell many copies but then doesn’t.
- Filling out online job applications, having interviews, accepting a job, and then realizing the company culture is not a good fit.
- Trying to make my daughter laugh and just got a blank stare.
- The list could go on and on.
What I learned
Like the tomato plant branching out into open areas, it’s impossible to plan for or avoid all obstacles. The tomato roots are still firmly planted and continue their mission of growth, and if the plant continues to focus on the broken branch, everything else will suffer and most likely die.
In the same way, we have to keep growing and striving for new opportunities regardless of the breaks we experience. If we experience setbacks, we cannot quit and dwell on the lackluster results but instead be like a tomato plant… accept the breaks, adjust, and keep growing.
