From Frustration to Success
A Contemporary Parable
Once there was a man who said he would help his wife weed the garden.
He was no expert gardener, but knew enough to go ahead on his own. Or so he thought.
He settled down to work, surveying the vast abundance of weeds. There were way more weeds than planted stuff. He had helped his wife sow the garden so he knew where the rows were. They were marked by stakes.
He started the painstaking work of isolating what he figured were pea plants out from all the mess of weeds. Looking around, he could not really see a row of pea plants. He thought that they were a bit thin here and persevered picking out all of the arm-fulls of weeds to reveal the straggly ‘pea’ plants.
A full hour later, he had little to show for his efforts.
“Man!” he thought. “There must be an easier way to do this!”
Just then his farmer friend who owned the property pulled up in his pick-up truck.
His friend joined him in the garden and informed him that he was weeding out a...weed! He was weeding out buck-wheat, which is a weed and NOT what he thought it was. To the inexperienced eye, buck-wheat is a pale imitation of a pea plant. It has spade-shaped leafs that spiral around a vine. Similarly, a pea plant has a heart-shaped leaf and grows on a vine.
Zoinks! He had just spent over an hour in the hot sun weeding out weeds.
On the bright side, his friend’s salient nugget of information provided a rapid answer to his desire to discover a quicker and easier way to weed the garden. His friend, a veteran gardener, knew exactly what to do and was happy to share his experience. Set on a more correct trajectory the man was able to plow through the remainder of the entire garden within only a couple more hours. The farmer’s advice came at just the right time and provided a sure-fire means to succeed at the task at hand. Before this important tip he was pretty much wasting his time in a state of idle.
In much the same way, you as an entrepreneur must recognize the fact that you likely cannot do everything required to launch your fabulous new idea or product. If you are struggling in a state of idle despite your best intentions you might want to ask yourself if you are weeding out the buck-wheat instead of the peas. In other words, is there a critical piece of information that you are lacking? You might not even realize it because you simply lack the experience (say, in marketing...) to isolate and deal with the weak area that is holding you back.
The man who thought he had the ability to weed the pea patch was fooling himself. He needed to consult with someone more expert to maximize his efforts. Failing to realize this, he has set out in vain to achieve an almost impossible task...to weed out the buck-wheat from a daunting mess of overgrown weeds.
You can appreciate in a very real way the contrast between the time when he labored in futility versus the time when he plowed ahead with confidence armed with the appropriate knowledge.
Identify and seek out the expertise that you need in order to launch your own enterprise. You will be delighted and surprised at how rapidly the universe will honor your intention!
This is a Buck Wheat plant...
...whereas this is a Pea plant. See the similarity? See the difference?
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