Farming Your Goals

I found my muse for this week’s post while sitting in a church pew this past Sunday.  Don’t worry, my post is not religion specific, and I promise not to preach to you as my reader.  As always my aim is to stimulate your thought, but you can be assured that regardless of where you fall on the religious belief spectrum, you will not feel disconnected to this week’s post. 

I was listening to the pastor’s sermon about a parable Jesus told his followers about a farmer planting his seeds.  With great intent I focused on paying attention, but admittedly my thoughts immediately wandered into the application of this parable about half way into it.  Based on the definition of a parable, the purpose is a real world application of a story.  Therefore the guilt I felt for day dreaming was very short lived since I was fulfilling the basic mission of parables.

The story talked about how the farmer tried to plant his seeds among various types of soil without harvesting a successful yield.  There were either crows that ate the seeds, the sun shriveled up the plants due to an arid climate, the soil was too sandy without much nutrients, or there were competing plant species stifling out the plants.  Then finally he planted them in just the right soil with the right nutrients away from predation by any natural elements such as birds or environmental factors and his yield was overwhelmingly abundant. 

While in my distracted contemplation of the story, I considered the farmer’s seeds as the lofty goals we set for ourselves, and the everyday objectives that we try to achieve in our lives.  It isn’t uncommon that many of us set out to achieve our goals and objectives but in doing so, we rely on the wrong resources, the wrong people, or even sometimes we are in the wrong location.  Unreliable people, faulty resources and bad locations serve as examples of environmental factors that can prevent us from achieving what we want to, or as the result in the farmer story, an unsuccessful yield.   

Our goals and objectives have to be rooted in situations where they can grow to become accomplishments.  Through the nourishment of our hard work, the right people, the right resources and location to name a few things, we are similar to the farmer who has to put in effort to water, remove weeds, and fertilize his plants to grow so that his crop can have a high yield. 

The farm of life that is filled with the plants of our goals, and objectives is one that sometimes takes time to grow.  A farmer will tell you that not all years in farming are banner years for crops but farmers do not take those setbacks and quit after one bad year.  Therefore similar to life where we are faced with failures in our goals and objectives we can’t quit either when faced with failures in our attempts to achieve certain goals or objectives.  Sometimes those things were not meant to be, and sometimes we need to just replant them, or in other words restart from a seedling again to create a better and stronger plant. 

A more drastic but sometimes necessary measure is completely moving the farm and starting in a new environment because that soil has been depleted of all supportive nutrients for the plants.  A new beginning in new soil is necessary sometimes.  This can easily be translated into a new job, a new work environment, a different city, or even a certain state where we may need to be in order for our goals and objectives to become more attainable.  Also crucial to this scenario is planting the proper crops or setting appropriate goals and objectives.  Going from a couch to a CEO might not be a direct manageable goal, but starting out with going for a supervisor role, then a middle management position, moving into an upper management role and then working into a CEO role is an example of planting the right seeds at the right times.

Whatever our goals and objectives are, it’s important that we are mindful that we are planting the right seeds in the right soil.  It’s also important that we are nourishing those goals and objectives with the hard work necessary to make them come to fruition.  While paying attention to these factors and removing the weeds, or the roadblocks from our lives holding us back from success, it is only a matter of time before our goals and objectives progress and sprout into attainment.