From One Seed

Let’s play a little game about a seed. The purpose of this game is to help you recognize the ‘seeds’ of influence in your life.

Take one incident in your life and work backward to find the one little thing that started it all! Take absolutely ANYTHING. Your latest significant win, that crazy purchase you made, or your current best or worst relationship. Now, trace backwards, or reverse engineer if you prefer, how that thing came to be.

Chances are incredibly high that you trace back more than a few years to someone you’ve long forgotten about who planted an idea for you to follow. Something like, “You really want to focus on THAT?” “Let me introduce you to …..” “My best advice is ….,” “Have you looked into ……” “Why doesn’t this…” or even “I need help here.”

Whatever you are looking at,

I promise you. It started as something tiny, the size of a pea. No smaller. The size of a tiny seed. And whether you realize it or not, you have been nurturing that tiny seed all along.

Now, it doesn’t matter if you choose to believe it was all YOUR nurturing that caused the reason to celebrate. My point is that your big win can always be traced back to someone who planted a seed that resonated with or grabbed your attention. And here you stand today.

For every one of us, it takes a village.

This is the power of collective action, and we are all a vital part of it. In fact, our collective lives are all about the ‘it takes a village’ approach.

I was reminded of this last weekend. I had listed our twenty-year-old leather love seat on the Facebook marketplace. I was reluctant to put it on the curb and expose it to the elements. Free to a fabulous home, I wrote. Three weeks and one false start later, it DID go to a fabulous home.

The lady who came with a truck and two lads was the finance manager of a social services office. A few years prior, she had noticed that the social workers were achieving great success with their caseloads. Except when it came to helping them get re-established in the community. Surprisingly, housing was not the problem. OUTFITTING the home with the bare essentials was.

So, she took it upon herself to tackle that very issue. She combed advertisements specifically for the word “FREE,” assessed what people were willing to give away for zero dollars, and found an immediate solution for the case workers. Within three months, she had organized a crew of volunteers to collect the free items and begin delivering them to the clients of the social workers.

Two years later and she had recently moved the operations into a larger warehouse, secured funding for a few more years, made arrangements with some of the local hotels to take their regularly replaced mattresses and box springs, and obtained an exclusive agreement with an estate auctioneer for the remaining items.

So far,

Her little volunteer operation has served nearly 1,000 abused, addicted, unhoused, and or down on their luck clients. She told me all this in the seven minutes it took for the two lads to move the coach. (I had zero idea about any of this before she arrived at our door.)

I’m betting you can see several benefits to this particular tiny seed of influence.

• Used, still serviceable furniture need not pollute the landfill.
• There are concrete ways we can help those in our community without breaking our budgets to do so.
• The joy of giving and helping others is a feeling like no other, and it connects us in ways we may not even realize.
• It is a super easy way to raise the goodwill of every single person involved.
• When judgment gets suspended, miracles can occur.
• Love can be a more powerful currency than money.

I share this little story for two reasons:

1. Our collective dopamine is at dangerously low levels these days. We all need to hear something cheerful and uplifting.

2. Seeds are all around us. Every hour of every week. Paying attention and then taking a small, imperfect action yields surprising results.

Now, back to the game we started and that original person you recalled from long ago. They gave you the seed, right? Over the next two weeks, YOU cast that same seed everywhere YOU go. Or, be on the lookout to see things others don’t and take action like this finance director did.

Pay attention to those you think could really make it take off. Because you have no idea where your seeds of influence will sprout and become something amazing.