Gardening our Lives
How many of our goals can we guarantee?
Approaching our personal and professional lives as gardeners is the best metaphor I’ve found for making sense of the constant interplay between the few things we can cause and the many over which we only have varying levels of influence or contribution.
Like gardeners, we can control some things: when we get out of bed in the morning, when we plow and plant (e.g. start new projects) and how faithfully we water and weed (e.g. sustain past projects). Like gardeners, we can be confident that our efforts are necessary – efforts are needed to contribute to success. At the same time, very few of the factors in our control actually cause success. Just as gardens are impacted by larger systems like weather, seasons and pests, our lives and organizations are interdependent on larger systems like genetics, relationships, and the economy.
Like with gardening, the efforts we exert in our families, jobs, and communities are in a perpetual limbo between clearly being necessary while at the same time not being fully sufficient to reach our goals. The big results we work for – our personal dreams and corporate missions - are beyond our direct grasp. I’ve found gardening to be such a helpful metaphor because it underscores the need for simultaneous agency (knowledge that our efforts can make a difference) and humility (knowledge that we play a small part). Additionally – and this is key – the gardening metaphor clarifies that all our efforts are part of a larger complex system. Within this context, effective life-gardeners embrace two truths:
Doing what we can do well is essential.
Holding the result loosely is wise because the harvest is dependent on forces outside our control.