I’ve been enjoying a lot of time outside this summer. Maybe you have too. One thing that time outdoors teaches us is the laws of nature. For instance, operating a business is a lot like gardening. If you’re a seed planter then time is your friend. If you know that you’ve planted lots of seeds and nourished them along, it’s just a matter of time before they grow. But if you’re a planner instead of a planter, time is your enemy. You can’t trust that time will bring forth fruit for you because you’ve never taken the action step of planting the seeds.

The old proverb says, “cast your bread upon the waters and after many days it will return to you.” You have to send forth in order for things to come back to you when you need them. Those who look up at the sky and won’t plant because it looks like it’s too windy or it might rain won’t reap a harvest.  You may be able to fool yourself with excuses, but neither nature nor the marketplace will accept them in lieu of planting.

Something to keep in mind when planting is that you rarely know what’s going to work — what’s a good seed (idea) or a bad one — until you plant it. If you constantly plant seeds and put things out there, something’s going to grow. It has to by law!

If you’ve planted enough seeds and don’t dig them up in unbelief, they will, in time, reap a  harvest.

Some people are prone to say “I’m planning my business, putting together my web site, creating my business cards, and getting everything together, planning, planning, planning.” But success requires more than that. You’ve got to do more than just plan your gard.en; you’ve always got to be planting. On the web, you can’t get so caught up in research and planning that you never do any planting. You should invest the bulk of your time planting and nourishing. It’s not that planning isn’t important. It’s just that it’s easy to get hung up on it and never get to the planting.

If you don’t plant, nothing grows. Zero.
Remember, excuses aren’t seeds!

A lot of people are like I was with fruit trees. When we first moved into our house, we thought about planting fruit trees. When I found out they took about three years before they bore fruit, I thought, “I don’t want to fool with that, I’m not going to get any fruit for ages!” So I didn’t plant anything. We still haven’t planted any fruit trees and we’ve been here for 10 years! We could have had a lot of fruit by now.

There are some people who live their whole lives like that. They don’t take action because they think it will take forever to see results. Remember that action is important. Not just any action… but planting.  (This is an excerpt from “How to Get More Done in a Day than Most Accomplish in a Week“)

Related Posts

• Seeds Grow Into Mighty Trees
• Seeds Grow Into Mighty Trees
• Finding Time for Your To Do List-Planning
• Finding Time to Get Unstuck When Your Planning Gets Bogged Down!
• Schedule a Creative Planning Day on Your Calendar

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Solo Entrepreneur Work Habits, Time Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.