Jumpstarting Our Seedlings Again
I’ve found that when we determine that it’s the best course of action to, metaphorically speaking, dump the bad soil from our seedling pots and replant with fresh new soil, not only are me much more likely to have the kind of outcomes we set to have when setting our goals in the first place, but also we’re better for having experienced such disappointments because we now know how to avoid such setbacks the next time. Doing this doesn’t make you a failure. It makes you wiser.
You might remember a couple of months back, I wrote about my daily rituals which still includes planting a tree seed in small peat pots. After the 90th day of doing this, I made a discovery—several of the seeds were sprouting by then, but not the ones one would expect. The first 40 or so seeds were not growing even after three months of care.
My first impulse with this situation was to just give the seeds a bit more time. Surely they’ll sprout soon and if toss them out and start over with new seeds, all that potential effort those seeds went through would be wasted. I deliberated on this for a few days, but I came to the conclusion that since I had planted the same sort of seeds in the early batches I planted as I did with later plantings and my watering schedules and amount of sunlight were all the same, it must have been the soil quality that was the deciding factor.
Upon reflection, that seems pretty obvious doesn’t it? Germinating seeds are pretty vulnerable to their growing environments. Conditions have to be pretty darn good or else the seeds just won’t grow. And the ground in which the seeds are growing in is clearly one of if not the most important factors. But thinking about this another way, how often to be assume that dirt is dirt and so once we’ve filled the pot with some type of earth, we jump directly to the daily grind of watering the seeds.
In a similar way, I’ve come to realize that certain aspects of my life fit this same sort of false assumption. I don’t always make sure that my goals are grounded on the firmest and richest soil possible. Some nights I stay up to late, and then I regret that the next morning, so I decide I’m going to get to bed by 10:30 each night. But unless I set a reminder at 10:00 PM to start my bedtime routine and give myself enough time between work to transition to other activities, inevitably, I start my bedtime routine late which means I don’t meet my goal.
Economists talk about something called the sunk cost fallacy. In a nut shell, this fallacy describes faulty logic that we humans fall for often where we continue to invest in causes, goals, projects, businesses, and other initiatives rather than cutting bait and trying something else. In a nutshell it’s that old belief, “We’ve already gone this far, we might as well keep going.” I definitely faced this fallacy when decided what to do with the dozens of pots that weren’t growing seedlings. Should i empty the pots, get better soil, and replant, or just keep waiting on the seeds that were planted in poor soil to somehow beat the odds and start growing?
It’s not an easy decision to make sometimes because generally the alternatives aren’t nearly as cut and dried as the economic graphs in your typical Econ 101 course would lead us to believe. Sometimes we’ve invested a considerable amount of emotional connection and a portion of our personal identities into some of our initiatives. We might worry about what others might think of us if we change course, especially after having declared our intentions to friends, family, or our social media connections.
But I’ve found that when we determine that it’s the best course of action to, metaphorically speaking, dump the bad soil from our seedling pots and replant with fresh new soil, not only are me much more likely to have the kind of outcomes we set to have when setting our goals in the first place, but also we’re better for having experienced such disappointments because we now know how to avoid such setbacks the next time.