Discipline, Consistency and Faith —

When my wife and I bought our house in 2001, the homeowners left three or four house plants behind. I took it upon myself to keep these plants alive along with the other plant life we’ve taken in over the years. I have done my best to water them once a week but at times they have went two or three weeks without being watered. Leaves would start to turn yellow as a visual reminder for me to water them and of course those leaves would eventually fall off.

Recently I came across the story of the Chinese bamboo tree. The growth pattern of this tree is quite extraordinaire. You see once you plant a bamboo sprout nothing happens … at least what you can visually see. For four or five years, sometimes longer, nothing happens. You water and fertilize, over and over again but you see no visual evidence that anything is happening. Unlike the plants I maintain which tell me by the color of their leaves, you would have no idea as you water it for those four or five years if it was actually growing or dead.

However, around the fifth year things change quickly. In a six-week period, the Chinese Bamboo Tree grows to a staggering ninety feet tall –yes, 90 feet tall! Some suggest that the tree has been known to grow 48 inches in a 24 hour period with potential to reach a maximum growth rate of 39 inches per hour for short periods of time.

Trying to reach your goal is very similar. We often water and fertilize our goal whether it be diet and exercise or in our businesses if we don’t see those initial results or some type of visual evidence things are working, we tend to get stuck, make excuses or worse, we give up. Similar to the Bamboo Tree, if at any point during those four or five years you stop watering or fertilizing, it too will die. However, by making a conscience effort to continue to stay focused and continue to water and fertilize every day, remarkable changes can take place at a rapid pace over a short period of time, similar to the Chinese Bamboo.

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