Growing in the Right Direction

“Are you green and grow­ing, or ripe and rot­ting?“
– Ray Kroc (Founder of McDonald’s)

What is a prob­lem? There’s a say­ing, which says that obsta­cles are what hap­pens when you take your eyes off your goals. I don’t agree because prob­lems can occur even when you are focus­ing on your goals. How­ever, I would cer­tainly agree that obsta­cles are what hap­pens when you take your eyes off your pri­or­i­ties. In fact, to the con­gru­ent per­son, prob­lems are not prob­lems but con­sid­ered as grow­ing pains.

You are always grow­ing no mat­ter what. Change is, in essence, the result of grow­ing. A “Help Wanted” ad caught my eye when it said: “We embrace change by hir­ing peo­ple who cre­ate it.” We do cre­ate our own changes. We are always grow­ing, always evolv­ing, always chang­ing. There­fore, since we can not stop that growth, the key to liv­ing a ful­fill­ing life is to choose how to grow and to grow in the right direction.

Like a plant that must first be tied to a stake in order for it to grow straight, you must learn to accept life’s gar­den stakes. Stakes are your teach­ers; peo­ple who have taught you or who are teach­ing you the things you need to learn. They can hold you back, make it tough for you, hurt you, say nasty things to you, or push you, but what they are really doing is teach­ing you.

Ulti­mately, they are mak­ing you stronger. They include your par­ents, spouses, bosses, men­tors, teach­ers, gov­ern­ment agen­cies, part­ners, cus­tomers, bankers, lawyers, com­peti­tors, friends, etc. They are like gar­den stakes that hold you as you set out to reach your goals, because they have some­thing to teach you first and do so whether they intended it or not.

Now, fail­ure and loss are also a part of life. You may lose money, time, peo­ple you love, even con­fi­dence in your­self. You may fail in busi­ness ven­tures, in reach­ing goals, in rela­tion­ships, or in the course of your life. You may even lose sight of your val­ues at some point in time, espe­cially when you have to start all over (as most suc­cess­ful peo­ple have).

As life’s prun­ing processes help you to lose that which will make you grow stronger, you must trans­late those fail­ures and losses as part of the prun­ing process of life that will help you grow healthier.

In addi­tion to life’s gar­den stakes and prun­ing processes, you prob­a­bly have to deal with neg­a­tiv­ity thrown at you from time to time. You must deal with chal­lenges, set­backs, dif­fi­cul­ties, and prob­lems. Now, you know what fer­til­izer is made of, right? It takes that kind of neg­a­tiv­ity from which can grow into a beau­ti­ful tree. There­fore, you must accept get­ting fer­til­izer occa­sion­ally thrown at you so as to grow stronger.

Life is indeed like a gar­den. If you want to grow in the right direc­tion and espe­cially in the direc­tion of your own choos­ing, you must learn to rec­og­nize life’s stakes, fer­til­iz­ers, and prun­ing processes. You not only have the abil­ity to grow, because we all do no mat­ter what, but also you have the abil­ity to choose how to grow. That’s what really important.

To grow either in age or in wis­dom, in wealth or in poverty, in health or in sick­ness, in love or in fear, or in knowl­edge or in igno­rance is all but a mat­ter of choice. You have the abil­ity to choose how you want to grow and to cre­ate the results you want. Ben­jamin Dis­raeli once said, “Men are not crea­tures of cir­cum­stances, cir­cum­stances are crea­tures of men.”

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

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