The Best Investment In Your Business Or Project?
Running or creating or owning a project or business can be all consuming.
It can feel like a race.
We’re constantly planning and plotting.
Thinking about ways we might win; whether new clients, partners, customers, whatever.
Yet all the while we’re focused on our little piece of the pie, our little tree sprouting in a much bigger forest, the wider world is constantly shifting and changing.
What if we’re looking in the wrong place? All that focus and energy and investment into sustaining and growing our little tree, maybe it’s misdirected.
Trees don’t speak loudly, which is probably why we’ve ignored them for so long.
There they are sitting quietly, saying little, all the while growing, changing, watching and, who knows, maybe laughing. At us.
Forests are remarkable. Intricate, regenerative networks of goodness, sharing wealth and resources, food and nutrients. Some of these networks exist for thousands of years; trees come and go, but the roots, the systems, the networks on which they grow live on, thriving, evolving, changing.
A business or project is like the tree. It’s the bit we can see. We invest all our energy and resource into it.
Maybe though we’d do better to learn from actual trees.
Maybe the real value is in what we can’t see.
Businesses started by older people have a much higher success rate. And maybe this is because of the root system, the networks which support them. These networks are richer, healthier, more dynamic. Networks which exist and behave as in a forest.