Summer is behind us; Autumn is just beginning. Fall festivals and harvest fairs are on the calendar. Harvest time. A period of celebration going back centuries. Millenia even. It was the harvest that fueled communities through the stinginess of winter and the necessary thriftiness of spring. Summer would bring moments of respite from the stored necessities while everyone waited for the annual fall bounty. Naturally there is a caveat to this celebratory season. You reap what you sow. In the words of American author Ralph Ransom, “Before the reward there must be labor.”
Some time ago we published Cultivating Greatness and said then to become great you must cultivate yourself to become a better you . “We know you are great at something. All of us are. Often it takes time for our great gift to reveal itself.” With apologies to ourselves, greatness does not simply reveal itself. “Before the reward there must be labor.” Or as we put it, “being great is hard work.”
There will come a time when you want to set aside the hard work and reward yourself for that labor. There will come a time to harvest the greatness you cultivated.
As with harvesting a crop or a backyard garden, there is more to reaping the bounty than simply pulling up what had been planted. As we had compared cultivating greatness to tending one’s garden, harvesting greatness also has its comparisons to reaping one’s bounty.
Be selective in your harvest: When it comes time to harvesting your greatness, take care to be certain you are ready to reap the benefits of what you have planted. Choose to activate only the ripe objectives and plans. Remember when you learned how to set goals. A goal must be specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic, and time-bound. Have you given your greatness goal enough time to have met the objectives of each step? Only then you can re-assess, re-set, and plan new activities based on what your learned while pursuing that goal. Having met the goal, you can experience the satisfaction of the job well done and harvest its benefits.
Pick from the excess: Choose to harvest only what you need for now. Like tomatoes and zucchini, even as sweet and satisfying as they are, greatness has a short shelf-life. Like those tomatoes and zucchini, you don’t pick all the fruit at once. You select what is ready to be used and let the younger fruit continue to ripen. So too when you are harvesting your greatness. What can you use now to its greatest advantage? When you are riding high on a success at work may be the right time to ask for a raise. Or it might be more prudent to use that goodwill to request additional resources for your team to continue pursuing other goals. Do you want to use all of an unexpected bonus to take the family on a long-needed vacation? Perhaps spread the benefits around on an often discussed remodel, repair, or replacement and add the remainder to the already established vacation fund. When it comes time to harvest your greatness you want to leave some that can continue to grow and add to your value.
Don’t uproot the plant: Think of your greatness as a perennial. You can harvest greatness while letting positive thought and action continue to grow. Do all you can not to completely exhaust yourself on a project or activity, whether at home or work. There will be times when you do overreach or strain your resources. When you mistakenly uproot a plant in the garden you pot it, nurture it, and ultimately replant it. If you should deplete your energy, you can recover or redirect it and rediscover your enthusiasm for life, resetting your garden of greatness.
You worked hard for your greatness. As we said in Cultivating Greatness, it isn’t something that just comes to you. You work for it. It is hard to be good. You work particularly hard to become great. You deserve to reap what you sow. Just as the harvests that are celebrated each fall, that which you gather from your success garden fuels your continuing accomplishments. When you harvest your greatness, you are relishing in success. You also are taking the first step in cultivating the next harvest of successes, planting the seed of hard work.
Success does come from hard work--it isn't a given. I love the analogy of harvesting your success. It presupposes that we actually choose to invest energy, time, and talent in growing ourselves to be better. A well-worded challenge, my friends. Thank you.