The Rose Bush Rule

👇 Get new sketches each week

Imagine your life is a rose bush. Each passion, interest, or piece of your attention at any time is a flower. To allow each bud to blossom, you give it your attention and care.

At different times in my life, I’ve had flowers blooming for family, my partner, music, studying, football, staying fit, hiking, exploring, new friend groups, being a father, working on a house, this project, swimming, my career, photography, drawing, a video game and more.

Thinking of my life like a rose bush encourages me to realise that putting all my attention across all of these flowers means none of them can be as full. There is only so much time and attention I can give.

It leads me to what I think of as The Rose Bush Rule: a rose blooms best when past blooms are pruned.

In order for another interest or passion to come in, it may be necessary to prune an existing bloom. When you do that, you give yourself more time and attention to the new things you care about and allow them to blossom to the full.

The same may be true for a business as in life. Too many competing priorities ultimately diminishes all of them and leaves you constantly switching focus.

Just like saying “no”, I don’t find it easy to prune things I enjoy or consider part of myself. But perhaps it’s just what I need. Is there anything you might benefit from pruning so other flowers can bloom?

I learned this metaphor from James Clear’s essay, What to Do When You Have Too Many Ideas and Not Enough Time , and he learned it from Travis Dommert. As James wrote:

“…new growth is natural and it's normal for tasks and ideas to creep into your life, but full growth and optimal living requires pruning.

We All Need to Cut Good Branches“

Related Ideas to Life Is Like a Rose Bush

Also see:

✨ Latest

Get the book!

Big Ideas Little Pictures

Prefer to listen?

Try the podcast

🎉 Help keep Sketchplanations ad-free 🎉 Keep this ad-free 🎉 Help keep Sketchplanations ad-free by supporting me

Keep exploring

Who cut down the last tree?

Everyone's a geek about something with people geeking out on many different activities

Everyone's a Geek About Something — Revised and Expanded

Joy and vulnerability

Leading from Any Chair

Jevons' Paradox

Eponym

If you lived on Easter Island, would you really cut down the last mighty tree knowing that would be it? It seems either foolhardy or desperate to knowingly cut down the last of a kind and your last source of timber. So how could it happen? Easter's End Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse and article Easter’s End, explains how this situation could happen through a gradual, hardly noticeable decline over many years. Those who remembered the great trees that they used to make rafts, canoes, and ships were old or had long since died. Today's trees may be nothing like the forests and towering trunks of tens or hundreds of years ago. As Jared puts it: "Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm." An alternative Easter Island history More recently, I read Rutger Bregman's story of Easter Island in his book Human Kind: A Hopeful History. In the chapter "The Mystery of Easter Island," he digs into the reconstruction provided by Diamond and others and questions whether the Easter Islanders really were reduced, after losing their trees, to infighting and destitution. Bregman found evidence to suggest that rather than driving themselves to the brink of extinction, the Easter Islanders were likely still thriving when Peruvian slave traders arrived in 1862, and sixteen slave ships carried off a third of the island's population, 1,407 people. Yet the worst for them was still to come a year later when the government was pressured to return the islanders home. A smallpox outbreak carried by the returning islanders wreaked devastation during the voyage, with hundreds dying at sea. The 15 islanders who made it home carried the virus with them, and it spread to the inhabitants who remained. He cites that the population was reduced to just 110 inhabitants in 1877 when the epidemic finally subsided. Until the arrival of the slave ships, the population, despite their trials, was still thriving. Bregman suggests that it was, in fact, contact with the rest of the world that destroyed Easter Island. For another thought-provoking perspective, Seth Godin asks who cut down the second-to-last-tree?If you lived on Easter Island, would you really cut down the last mighty tree knowing that would be it? It seems either foolhardy or desperate to knowingly cut down the last of a kind and your last source of timber. So how could it happen? Easter's End Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse and article Easter’s End, explains how this situation could happen through a gradual, hardly noticeable decline over many years. Those who remembered the great trees that they used to make rafts, canoes, and ships were old or had long since died. Today's trees may be nothing like the forests and towering trunks of tens or hundreds of years ago. As Jared puts it: "Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm." An alternative Easter Island history More recently, I read Rutger Bregman's story of Easter Island in his book Human Kind: A Hopeful History. In the chapter "The Mystery of Easter Island," he digs into the reconstruction provided by Diamond and others and questions whether the Easter Islanders really were reduced, after losing their trees, to infighting and destitution. Bregman found evidence to suggest that rather than driving themselves to the brink of extinction, the Easter Islanders were likely still thriving when Peruvian slave traders arrived in 1862, and sixteen slave ships carried off a third of the island's population, 1,407 people. Yet the worst for them was still to come a year later when the government was pressured to return the islanders home. A smallpox outbreak carried by the returning islanders wreaked devastation during the voyage, with hundreds dying at sea. The 15 islanders who made it home carried the virus with them, and it spread to the inhabitants who remained. He cites that the population was reduced to just 110 inhabitants in 1877 when the epidemic finally subsided. Until the arrival of the slave ships, the population, despite their trials, was still thriving. Bregman suggests that it was, in fact, contact with the rest of the world that destroyed Easter Island. For another thought-provoking perspective, Seth Godin asks who cut down the second-to-last-tree?

Newer

RRandom

Older

When you buy through links on sketchplanations.com, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
Browse all books