Hard work does not guarantee success
Hard work. Graft. Slogging away. How often in business and in life do we make a virtue of it? The more knackered we are, the greater our sense of pride. The shinier our halo. And the more legit our bragging rights.
This year, I learnt an important lesson about hard work. And it was a little different to the typical story outlined above.
Hard work doesn’t have nearly as much bearing on our successes as we’d like to think. Nope, hard work does not guarantee success, my friend. Let me share with you the story that convinced me of it…
A story for those who have failed. And for those who succeed in spite of themselves.
Last September I was gifted some vegetable seeds. The amateur gardener in me was chuffed. 2021 was my very first crack at growing my own vegetables.
As winter edged towards spring, my excitement grew. I wanted to get the seedlings started early doors, I couldn’t wait for the weather to warm up so I could plant them outside. A quick search of the internet and I found just the thing for a beginner veg grower: one of those plastic greenhouses. A fabric outer, propped up over a build-it-yourself-frame and secured with guy lines and pegs in the ground! Happy days.
And they were. My seedlings got off to a cracking start. For two months it was bliss.
That was until May. Cast your mind back… we’re betwixt two bank holidays, the days are lengthening and, you would hope, the weather is taking a turn for the better.
The things you can’t control, 1: Weather
Not quite. One particularly windy, wet Friday in early May I looked out of the kitchen window at the greenhouse. I could see that one of the pegs had come loose and the rope was flapping in the wind. There was no time before my Zoom call… I’ll come back and sort it after.
After my call, I looked out the window to see the greenhouse cartwheeling down the garden. Plants, seed trays, and compost lay in its wake.
I ran out to the garden, quick as a flash. The greenhouse was lying on its back on the grass. There I was crawling around in the mud and the dirt, trying to salvage what I could.
All my effort, ruined
How annoying! After I’d worked so hard, planted my very first seeds all the way back in February. All that time and effort, and for what?!
But there was no time for self-pity.
I took a number of instant decisions, in a Casualty-style state of clarity I had to triage the plants on the spot: ‘unscathed’, ‘no way’, and ‘potentially salvageable’. I made some sacrifices without much emotion, which surprised me. There was nothing else to do but put my energy towards what could be saved. I placed the unscathed plants and the ‘wait and see’ strategically out of the wind. The rest I binned.
Next task: what to do with the greenhouse? Try to fight the wind and put the greenhouse back up, or take it down and chance the plants? I decided on the latter. With more wind and rain forecast, I guessed that it would be pointless to try and secure the greenhouse. It would be more effort than it was worth and it didn't guarantee a favourable outcome. So I ditched it.
Well, that’s surprising…
Even though the seedlings had all been upturned on their fairground-ride around the garden, a few days later they actually looked pretty well! After a weekend exposed to the endless rain and fierce wind, they looked remarkably healthy – perhaps even more vigorous than when they were in the greenhouse!
I was worried about putting the plants outside until the weather had brightened up a bit. They had certainly thrived in the greenhouse. But outside they seemed to take on a brighter, more confident demeanour. A strange thing to say about plants, perhaps, and yet the difference was perceptible. They looked greener, bushier, had a different attitude. Perhaps the fresh air had done them good?! Like the runner who looks more energetic when they start putting some serious miles in, these guys seemed to bloom as a result of their ordeal.
L E S S O N S | i
So what can we learn from this curious little adventure? And how on earth do marrows relate to marketing?!
A crisis focusses the mind! If there’s one thing anyone used to working with clients can attest to, this is certainly a universal truth. Need I say more?
What happens when we release our ideas into the world? They flourish. I had been fretting about moving the plants out of the greenhouse. What if I get it wrong? What if it’s still too cold? Has the last frost definitely passed?! When my hand was forced, they did a lot better than I expected.
In trying to shield my seedlings until the moment was ‘right’ I placed too much importance on my own role in the process. When is the ‘right’ time for anything, really? We think we can shape the outcome of everything if we only pick the ‘right’ moment. Perhaps we can, to an extent. But our influence is a lot smaller than we think. Or, at the very least, our influence interacts with so many other influences at any given moment, that we can never choose 100% the right moment for anything.
Now comes that lesson on hard work.
As I crawled over the wet grass, retrieving plants and cursing all the effort I’d put in, and the wind, and the stupid greenhouse, I realised something. You can work as hard as you like, but you can't account for every outside force. Even the ones you anticipate can surprise you. I thought I was protecting my plants from the weather by keeping them tucked up inside. In the end, the weather got to them anyway, just not in the way I had expected.
Watching the greenhouse tumble down the garden was a humbling reminder that hard work can amount to nothing. It is entirely possible that you’ll work hard on something and the wind will blow it away. Think of it like natural selection. I sacrificed the smallest, weakest plants without a second thought in that moment, because my hand was forced. Had I not had that disaster, I probably would have continued to try and nurture them, taking away my attention from the plants that had the better chance of giving a good crop. Attention divided is watered down.
Disaster isn’t a full stop…
As it happened, my plants didn’t die. They thrived and have brought me joy and literal food for most of the year. While I was crawling around in the broken greenhouse I thought to myself that the episode would make a great newsletter. And when I saw that the plants had not only survived but thrived, I was sure of it.
As far as I was concerned, that was it! Newsletter, done; I'll recount in my September newsletter a lovely little story about how hope came out of disaster, how I enjoyed the fruits of my labour even though it seemed like all was lost back in May.
And that’s true, in part.
But that’s only a piece of the story.
From disaster came success…
The cucumbers that I didn't expect much from have been numerous and tasty. The aubergines I thought would never come to anything have just gone into a delightful Moussaka. I've harvested a gorgeous pumpkin and have stored it away till later on.
The tomatoes I was nervous about putting outside? They have given a bumper crop. Not that I have anything to compare it to, though they seem to be never-ending which is bumper enough in my book. All summer we've enjoyed salads fresh from the garden. I've whipped up the glut of little red fruits into soup, homemade passata, all manner of lovely things.
I even have a few peppers on my pepper plant, which I didn’t think would even survive outside the warmth of the greenhouse let alone produce fruit. I’m hoping they’ll ripen into lovely orange and red peppers too.
The things you can’t control, 2: Pestilence
The heading of this section is pestilence. I’ll spare you the COVID parallels. You’re clever enough to work it out and I’m sure you don’t want me banging on about it when the news has it covered 24/7.
It's not all rosy. The ‘success’ picture isn’t black and white. Nothing ever is, is it?
The cucumber has veered from bright-young-thing to death's door and back again several times. It's currently on its third flush of flowers. Who knows, maybe there'll be more cucumbers soon?!
My purple sprouting broccoli was absolutely mullered by caterpillars.
I noticed a couple of weeks ago that a couple of the tomato plants were afflicted with tomato blight. They've been removed and the others seem to be holding up alright for now. But you never know!
L E S S O N S | ii
From disaster sprung abundance and from plenty sprung disease. The lifespan of my plants shows the natural peaks and troughs of all things. Of course, you could substitute ‘abundance’ and ‘disease’ with any other measure you like.
Happiness. Sadness.
Success. Failure.
Gain. Loss.
I was also reminded that being an optimist isn’t all positive. Like most things, it’s a dichotomy: I really should have covered my purple sprouting broccoli rather than taking my usual 'Chuck it in the ground, it'll be alright' approach to gardening. The caterpillars were fed good and proper. Best practice is useful to a point. Sometimes you do have to beat your own path though. Like with the pepper plants! Had I listened to the advice that they must be grown in a greenhouse in the British climate, I’d have binned them, assuming they wouldn't survive, let alone fruit.
What I discovered, as I was mentally prepping this newsletter, is that the story never really ends.
As I reached the point of congratulating myself that everything had worked out just fine, the picture revealed its complexities. It reinforces in my mind again that nothing is permanent. You will fail. You will succeed. And you shouldn't congratulate yourself too much for the latter, nor berate yourself too much for the former. There are many things beyond our control and usually, I have come to realise, the best thing we can do is simply ride the wave.
I succeeded, in the sense that I had never grown any veg before and I have eaten plenty of my own home-grown veg all summer long. This ‘success’ came even though I had no real clue what I was doing, no experience and no expectations. Sometimes ‘success’ doesn't have to be about slogging your guts out to achieve something. Sometimes success, however you define it, happens in spite of ourselves.
Don't get me wrong, I worked hard planting, potting on, digging, pruning and lugging watering cans around. But it was different to how I might approach something like work. I wasn’t in competition with myself, or anything else. I simply was, and that ‘was’ in this instance happened to be gardening.
How easy would it have been for my neighbour to look over the wall and feel jealous? And how often do we do that in our own business lives? We look over the wall at what someone else is growing and we feel envious, put out, irritated. Convinced that if we had only worked harder, we'd have a feast of veg to enjoy too.
While I put physical effort into the work, spent hours on it, I noticed that I didn't obsess about it in the same way that I might about work. Or creativity. Or social media, or any of those other things. It was about the process more than the outcome. I enjoyed the work. The beetroots, like dazzling rubies, and the most carroty-tasting-carrots I've ever had were a bonus.
So if you find yourself feeling a little envious when you see others succeeding, if you find the negative voice telling you that you're failing, take a breath. Know that they can't help that they have a tailwind rather than a headwind right now. And know that they probably have less control over that success than they'd like you to believe anyway.
Success isn’t always preceded by hard work
You can control what seeds you plant in the soil and how often you water them – and that’s about it.
Hard work doesn’t guarantee success. But when it comes to endeavour, disaster isn’t always as bad as it seems. And success is not the end of the road.
If we can remember that and bring that to our writing, our marketing, our business, then we stand to do ourselves a favour. Not least because when we do experience a ‘success’ moment, we might be able to just chill out and enjoy it, rather than thinking we have to try and bottle the essence of what we did, so we can replicate it.
Oh, and the other thing? Don't buy cheap plastic greenhouses. You'll end up buying twice or having to get rid of the thing after a very short amount of time. Nobody needs that, especially not landfill.
Your words matter,
Laura
P.S. I’m delighted to say that there’s a new episode of The Ordinary Extra podcast up!
The lovely Andy Hook shares his thoughts on why community matters and why the best things in life are often the little things.
If you haven’t already, check it out here or search ‘The Ordinary Extra’ wherever you get your podcasts.
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Thank you!