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 quality of the tomatoes we were getting in our grocery pickup. (We’ve been using the grocery pickup option 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 can 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.

Facing the Mirror

My senior year of high school was a whirlwind. While I did the bare minimums to skate through my required classes, I was working as hard as I knew how in what turned into a full time job (with a full benefits package) before I even graduated and dove in head first to every other kind of shenanigan I could find as soon as I clocked out. The seeds from even the most insignificant adversities were there, I just wasn’t bothered about finding them!

During the winter of that final year in high school, I carried a heavy workload from Sunday morning through Thursday night. I was off nearly every Friday and Saturday, not because the grocery store manager was that compassionate, but because I ran out of hours. (Hourly employees being paid overtime in the grocery business back then was  cardinal sin…) Here’s where I’ll insert one more reminder that idle time is indeed the devil’s playground; that’s exactly what started each Friday as I drove out of the school parking lot and went on until I finally grabbed a few hours of sleep before reporting back to work at 5am on Sunday.

I had become friends with two of my older coworkers since transferring stores. Both were ten to fifteen years older than me, and both had made decisions that resulted in them not having a driver’s license. They lived nearby and often worked the closing shift with me so I frequently gave them rides home. I soon built up the courage to ask whichever I was driving home on a Thursday night to buy me beer so I could get an immediate start as I left school on Friday. What could possibly go wrong?

As if keeping the six pack of Ice House long-necks on the floorboard of my vehicle parked on school property wasn’t pushing the envelope enough, having either of those guys buy beer and carry it to my vehicle before the store closed bumped against every possible boundary. After a few months of that, the grocery manager grew suspicious and questioned us. We didn’t get in any actual trouble, but it certainly scared me enough that I found a different process for securing my stash before my days off.

As much potential as that had for disaster, it still wasn’t enough for the moment of brutal self-honesty I really needed. I could list dozens of other close calls that should have served as the slap to the back of my head necessary for me to begin facing the mirror. Since they were just close calls, and since I was far too hard headed for my own good, the seeds weren’t identified and they clearly weren’t going to grow on their own. Thankfully, those seeds weren’t completely wasted; I found them years later and have nurtured them ever since. We’ll circle back to that later on, though.

By the end of the summer after graduating high school, I was on track to start the management trainee program within the grocery store chain - I just wasn’t interested in it. I took a job back in construction early that fall, which meant I had evenings and weekends to go all-in on the nonsense I could only squeeze in on Fridays and Saturdays previously. After a year and a half of that, doing everything in my power to live out an AC/DC song in real time, I had a moment of brutal self-honesty where I realized I needed a change.

I’d love to tell you that this was where I got my shit together, gave up drinking and all the other dumb stuff, and pursued a college degree with vigor; it wasn’t. But scraping ice off the rafters to drive nails through several layers of roofing metal with a broken hand was enough to make me realize that I needed to pursue a different line of work. After blindly floating applications for a couple of months, I accepted an entry level position in a manufacturing facility. I thought that would be just what I needed to re-engage in school and conquer the world. What that ended up being, at least at first, was a bigger paycheck to fund the same nonsense I had been doing on a budget. But even facing the mirror for just a minor change in direction forced me to take ownership of situations I wasn’t completely satisfied with, and that eventually led to a few small career wins. Before we dig into those in more detail, think about how self-honesty in adversity reveals seeds that blame obscures. That is truly the starting point for leadership self-control. Be sure to block some “mirror-time” of your own and honestly assess one ongoing bad situation. Be sure to write down at least one truthful insight it offers.

Small Wins Through Consistency

Knowing that I had so much untapped potential academically stung a bit, even if that was only subconsciously at the time. If I was doing anything back then to intentionally grow just the slightest seed, it was through my role in the workforce. I produced solid results and had some great opportunities in a relatively short period of time in retail, but I didn’t see that as a career. Who knows, that may have been me ducking responsibility? Regardless, construction was the only other thing I felt competent in at that point. But no matter how hard I was willing to work, the physical demands were tremendous and I was genuinely a boy among men in the profession. I know, no sixteen to eighteen year old male - at least not in those days - would be willing to openly admit that. Looking back, though, I definitely was. I weighed around 135 pounds, maybe 140 if I was wearing boots and I had a few rocks in my pockets. As much as I tried, I was mediocre at best. My first moment of brutal self-honesty, at least career-wise, came on January 2, 1996; that was the day I scraped ice off the rafters to nail down roofing metal with a lump on my right hand the size of a golf ball.

By early March that same year, I started down a whole new path. I barely knew what went on in a manufacturing facility during the interview process but I somehow earned an offer for one of forty open positions. This was the first time the company had accepted applications for full time spots off the street in years and around a thousand people applied. I understood construction, carpentry specifically, fairly well but I didn’t consider myself all that mechanically inclined otherwise. What I had learned to do as well as anyone was show up and put in the effort. Thankfully, much of the technical understanding I had developed in carpentry translated - eventually. And while this new line of work was indeed physical, it didn’t require the sheer force that I had to expend in rough framing or pouring concrete. As I learned the routines and patterns necessary to keep up with the machines I was feeding throughout each shift, I was also learning the required steps for doing changeovers and minor maintenance. That understanding of routines and patterns has become one of the most powerful tools in everything I’ve accomplished since so we’ll give that a much deeper look soon enough.

Before I expand on my early manufacturing experience, I’ll share that I was also enrolled in a few courses at our local community college at the time. I thought I had interest in being an architect back then, mainly due to being around carpentry and construction most of my life to that point. I did fine through the classes that were directly related to architecture, but had no interest whatsoever in anything else. By the time I realized the degree I was (kind of) pursuing was a five-year program for a full time student, only to land me in a three-year internship of sorts that paid less than I was making with modest overtime in the factory, I stopped enrolling in classes.

Even then, success was incremental at best and very limited to what I was doing during each shift and within my home department. But in spite of all the other squandered opportunities and poor decisions, those small, consistent wins nurtured hidden seeds. Applying persistence through our adversities can harvest leadership lessons that compound over time, even if those lessons take years to sink in (like they did in my case). The reality is that accepting those lessons requires courage and self-control. We’ll pick up there next. Until then, pick on small, consistent action to nurture a seed from a bad situation you’re working through currently - and track your progress over the next week.