Good morning, and happy Hump Day! I hope your day is off to a great start.
Sometimes, when you’re looking for solutions to a problem, things begin to appear out of thin air. At least that’s the way it feels. You know what you think you need, but something you never really considered comes along and says, “Here – try me.” It may be something very familiar, or something completely out of the blue. You just never know.
Yesterday morning, as I was starting my day, I got a completely unexpected email offering me some ongoing freelance work for the next several months. It’s work I’ve done before, and for a company and team with whom I truly enjoy working. And it couldn’t have come at a better time.
Anybody who’s ever applied for a military career has taken the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB as it’s known. It’s a long test full of questions designed to identify your ideal vocations. At the end, they give you some recommended options from which to choose. And the whole time you’re thinking, “Who wrote these questions???” Well, that would be me.
I first stumbled across this opportunity several years ago when my contract ended in a previous job. Unemployment will get you busy, and there’s no telling what you’ll turn up. And in all honesty, most of it is garbage. I’ll never forget the guy who wanted me to write a federal grant proposal so he could get the money to save a few acres of hunting land in a divorce. I wish I was making that up.
But somewhere through all of that, I came upon the opportunity to write a series of questions relating to general shop knowledge – wood shop, metal shop, etc. That blossomed into writing for four different sections of the test, and when the assignment was over, they promised I’d hear from them again. More than 1,000 questions later, they still reach out to me every time they get a new contract.
So, I guess you could say this one didn’t literally just drop out of the air. I have a history with this company, and it’s paid off well. But if I had never gone looking for freelance work that first time, I’d have never heard about the new opportunity today. They’d have found somebody else years ago who could do the job just as well, and that’s who would have gotten the call this time.
It’s hard to tell sometimes exactly what will grow when you plant a seed. But if you never went looking for a seed in the first place, the answer is weeds – because, in my experience, weeds are perennial and grow in every square inch of ground that doesn’t have something else growing in it. The best way to avoid weeds is to choke them out with the good stuff.
Sometimes, the best things in life take the longest to cultivate. I read that a cherry seed can take up to 100 years to germinate and begin to grow. In that length of time, it’s likely the grower will have gotten impatient and planted a dozen other things right next to it. But sooner or later, a stalk with a few little leaves will begin to emerge and grow into a magnificent hardwood specimen.
It works that way with relationships, jobs, business ideas, and any number of things we really want. But unless you go looking for a seed in the first place, there’s nothing to plant and nothing to cultivate. And in its absence, weeds will grow. The most beautiful sprawling lawn was once an undeveloped eyesore. Somebody had to see its potential beauty long before it began to show.
If there’s something you want to do, something you’d like to improve, or something you think you’d like to drop out of thin air when you need it the most, now is the time to start planting those seeds. If we wait until we’re hungry to plant a garden, we’ll be eating dirt for several months before anything good comes up. Dig the well before you get thirsty. Find the solution before you have the need.
We can’t take advantage of every opportunity that comes our way. But make no mistake, if we don’t take a chance on any of them, we’ll find fewer new opportunities coming along behind them. Opportunity favors those who seek it. It only knocks if the door is open and the lights are on. But if you close the door and turn off the lights, it’ll just move on to somebody who wants it more.
Plant those seeds. Put a little faith in something that may not look so awesome on the surface. The most radiant diamond was once a chunk of coal. If you open your eyes and your mind, there’s a diamond in the rough right there in front of you. All you have to do is pick it up and do something to really make it shine.
That’s all for now. Have an awesome day!
© 2019 Dave Glardon – All rights reserved
Dave Glardon 