Lessons on Growing a Beautiful Career and Life

The garden is a metaphor for life. Horticulturist Liberty Hyde Bailey once said, “A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.”  A bountiful life is a garden filled with career, family and friends, hobbies and, yes, even chores.

Plant a Variety
There are three different fields in our gardens: vegetable garden, flower garden and herb garden. Our career gardens yield vegetables, fruits and all things that sustain our physical needs. The bounty of this garden feeds you, pays the bills, and sometimes leaves enough extra to put away for later use.

In the flower garden, you sow the seeds for things that you do that simply bring beauty and joy to your life. You fill this garden with beautiful family, friends and activities that make your life worth living. You still need the income of the career garden, but the career garden somehow is not as beautiful without the marigolds growing next to the tomatoes.  Your flower garden yields happiness and fulfillment. You will not live off the flower garden, but no one wants a landscape completely devoid of flowers.

The third field is smaller, but it is no less important. The gardener fills the herb garden with things that are add-ons. The herbs don’t sustain you by themselves, and they don’t necessarily bring the flowering beauty of the flower garden, however, the herb garden amplifies or enhances what you are already doing in other areas of your life.

The herb garden could be the professional connections for which you make time—like the networking breakfasts—because you know that those are going to add or enhance your business. Your herb garden also includes your faith life or spirituality that adds a richness or depth to everything else in your life.

Prepare the Soil
Not all fields are ready to plant at the same time. A wise gardener takes the time to prepare the soil and allows a field or two to remain fallow so that it has time to regenerate before she plants something new. The garden of our lives is the same. Today, your career garden might be bearing more fruit that you anticipated.

Fertilize
Bad things happen. Luck changes. People die. Businesses you love will go under. People will feed you manure and expect you to swallow it. Go ahead and take some of it, this is the fertilizer of life. When it seems like the garden is buried in bull%#@*, a plant pokes through, bigger and stronger than before.

Water
Your garden will not survive for long without water. Sometimes you water your gardens with perspiration and sometimes you water with tears. Sometimes you’re working in the garden and you’re making progress. You’re digging, you’re planting and you’re just sweating through all of those activities. The hard work, sweat equity, pays off. However, sometimes the garden doesn’t grow the way you want it to or you’re overwhelmed by the task from the weeds, the insects, and the weather. Things get you down and at those moments, you water your garden with tears. No matter how you water your garden—perspiration or tears–it’s still the same water. Sometimes, there is nothing you can do except sit it out and wait for the storm to water the garden for you; then you will learn to dance in the rain.

Weeds
No garden is safe from weeds. Be cautious not to eradicate your entire garden when a few weeds emerge. Most of the time you don’t need to spread RoundUp like Monsanto to make your crops grow stronger.

Every gardener has a bad day where the “weed” from down the hall pops up and threatens to choke out her growth. Do not jump to the rash conclusion that the entire garden has gone to pot. Don’t rip out the entire garden or quit your job because of a weed or two. Pull the weed or move the plant. Usually a change to another department or onto another project allows enough sunshine through to help you grow strong and bountiful again.

Other times, what you thought were beautiful flowers turn out to be weeds that threaten the entire garden. It’s okay to pull them; the gardener has to protect the garden from these invasive species.

To Everything, there is a Season
Be mindful of the seasons. Not everything in your garden will grow at the exact same time, so make sure you plant accordingly. If you want something always to be blooming in your life you have to always be planting something or working at something. Spring brings daffodils and hycinth. Fall yields crysanthemums.  In order to reap continually the rewards of what you sow in your garden, you have to work consistently, a little bit all the time not in bursts. You also have to know which parts of the field to leave fallow.

Fallow fields rejuvenate. If you are too tired from working the vegetable garden, you will naturally need to let a field go fallow from time to time. Maybe you cannot go out with friends and family during November and December because you work retail. That’s okay. Leave the flowers alone for a while. A few weeks of inattention won’t make them wither and die.

Keep in mind that when a plant withers and it’s no longer producing, it takes up space in the garden that could be put to better use.  This is true for everything you plant in life from the business relationship that’s no longer fruitful, to the job that you once loved when it was thriving but now is all thorns and no flowers. It could be the personal relationships that were not nurtured and have now whithered and died. Know when it’s time to cut them back or dig them out to make room for something else in the garden that will satisfy your real needs.

Pests
No matter how well you tend to it, you garden will occasionally have problems with pests. The pests can be people that drop in your life that create problems in your garden, or they might be the changing life circumstances that alter the garden. Never fear. Remove the pests and get on with your gardening.

Sharpen Your Tools
I dull hoe, broken shovel, and rusty rake make it more difficult to grow a bountiful garden. They do the task, but not as well as fresh, new tools will. Sharpen the hoe by learning something new. Buy a new shovel, some shiny gardening shoes, or some boots to slop around in the mud, to make the job easier. Clean up the rake. If your skills are getting rusty in an area, volunteer your time or take a class to brush up on those skills. There will, surely, come a season when a rake will come in handy.

Invest in a Root Cellar (and a Vase)
During the times when your garden grows out of control, abundantly winding its ways past even your wildest dreams. Dig a root cellar. Put aside some of this season’s crop for the famine that will surely strike at some time. Put some flowers in a vase to enjoy now and dry some to remind you of better times with friends and family when the days are long and dark, as they will certainly be. Plant tiny herbs or start a few seeds at the windowsill for when the sky is bright and sunny again and the days are long and warm. In this way, a sharp gardener is is ready to plant when each garden is ready.

You are the gardener. You, and only you, have jurisdiction over the garden of your life. The fruit, flowers and herbs it bears are a direct result of what you plant and how well you tend each area of the garden. Chose wisely, tend it well, and never be afraid to pull it all up and start over when your taste in crops changes.