EVERYTHINGS COMING UP ROSES

Spring is in the air, the days are starting to get longer, the lawn needs to be cut twice a week, and about once a day I have a pick-up truck stop by and ask if I need any yard work done or my gutters cleaned. I have already bought the hanging baskets that I place around my yard and I have planted my flower beds for summer.

Actually planting the flower beds is what gave me the idea for today’s post. As I was “turning” the soil (for those of you that don’t garden, turning the soil is the same as tilling except you do it by hand with a shovel) I noticed all the dead and decomposing plants from last year that I was turning under. All of these dead plants and leaves would turn into organic matter that will help this year’s plants grow. This is the cycle that any garden or farm land takes year after year. The trick to keeping a good healthy garden of any type, flower or vegetable, is to make sure you put in more nutrients than the plants take out. This way the ground stays fertile and you will have a flourishing garden.

Isn’t it the same way with success? Don’t you need to put in more energy, more positiveness, more motivation every year than you use so you will have a healthy future? I believe this is true, but then how can I justify the fact that as sales reps we will have more failures than successes every year? It is a hard concept to grasp, by having more failures you can become more successful.

I then started to compare my flower garden with my success. I had an AH HA moment. OUR FAILURES ARE THE FERTILIZER FOR OUR SUCCESS! Just like plants of the past are the fertilizer for the flowers this year our failures of the past are the fertilizer that help our new ideas develop, help our attitudes stay good and keeps our motivational levels the highest they can possibly be.

All the past failures we have had started out as good attempts at success. They brought us every bit as much pleasure as last year’s flowers brought everyone who saw them. These beautiful attempts, although ending up in failure, at worst taught us what not to do, and at best put us on track to find ways to do things that will lead to future successes.

Mother Nature figured this out millions of years ago, she has been growing forests on the fertilizer of past forests since the dawn of time. I am not as smart as Mother Nature, I just caught on to her trick. Now that you know it, maybe you can start your garden of success, growing upon the fertilizer of your past failures too.

Lorin