Seeds Don’t Grow Themselves

Just so it’s fresh in our minds, let’s revisit Napoleon Hill’s quote from Think and Grow Rich that serves as the foundation for all we’ll be working through moving forward: “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” Nearly three and a half decades removed, I can list dozens (maybe hundreds) of lessons I learned from those experiences during my high school years where I was the epitome of mediocrity masquerading as stability. To that end, I can even rattle off a bunch of what were truly only minor adversities in the grand scheme of things - even though they often felt insurmountable in the moment - that indeed served as seeds to equal and greater benefit. And as true as that is, I can assure you that those seeds didn’t grow themselves.

They say hindsight is 20/20. Maybe, but for that to be accurate, we’ll have to address the sting of untapped potential head-on and take a hard look in the mirror. Before we do that, though, let’s make sure we have the proper context. 

Not only did I miss most of the immediate equal or greater benefit from the plethora of nonsense I engaged in through my high school years, there was little chance at the time of me even finding the seeds. That would have required me to look for them, and I most definitely was not! Truth be told, I’m not sure I knew I was supposed to be looking for them back then.

Let’s pretend for a minute that I was actively working to identify the lessons from each adversity, regardless of how insignificant it may have been. This is likely second nature for you, but bear with me as I embellish a point. Finding the seed and reaping any kind of harvest from that seed are two very different things. A few years ago, Cindy and I attempted to grow a few tomato plants. She’s always enjoyed plants, indoors and out, and we weren’t thrilled with the qualities of the tomatoes we were getting in our grocery pickup. (We’ve been using that service since well before Covid; it’s prevented me from offering to help discipline other people’s kids inside the store - when they clearly had no intention of doing so themselves.) During the entire summer, we picked a dozen or two tomatoes from a total of six plants. Had we calculated our time along with all the fertilizers and pesticides we bought, those tomatoes probably cost about $50 each - and they still had black spots all over the bottoms. 

Here’s the lesson we learned from our futile attempt at growing our own tomatoes: nothing about our approach was right. We didn’t plant them in the proper conditions, and we definitely didn’t have the time to provide them with the care they needed. The crappy ones from the store weren’t so bad after all… Had we not been willing to have a moment of brutal self-honesty, we may still be dumping money into attempting to grow our own bad tomatoes.

Thinking back on my last few years of high school, identifying a potential lesson for any less than desirable situation would have been a significant step up from what I was doing at the time, but that alone wouldn’t have yielded any more of a harvest than we got from our tomato plants. Not only does finding the seed to an equal or great benefit require active searching, growing that seed calls for deliberate nurturing to have any hope of cultivating essential leadership traits from the ground up. Before digging into the most critical thing we do to start that process, I want you to think about one minor setback you’ve experienced and list the potential seeds you can point to with your 20/20 hindsight. Then pick one you can begin to nurture.