“Like rose bushes, your business and life also need the same three types of pruning to be all that you desire. Pruning is the central theme of necessary endings: removing whatever it is in our business or personal life whose reach is unwanted or superfluous. The areas of your business and life that require your limited resources—your time, energy, talent, money—but are not achieving the vision you have for them should be pruned.”
Wow, what a thought-provoking book. We all know there are times and seasons for everything under the sun, I believe a wise man named Solomon said this many years ago. Well, there are relationships that need to end, there are things in life that need to end. There are always things in our lives that need to end. I personally think to myself, “bad eating habits.” We will see how that fits with Dr. Clouds book.
“Many of us have some internal resistance to change or growth that hinders us from moving forward. One reason for this is that we have incompatible wishes. We want two things that can’t both happen at the same time. We want more time with friends, and also to really work on our marriage, or we want to save more and buy that new car. Part of maturity is getting to the place where we can let go of one wish in order to have another. The immature mind “wants it all,” which keeps people from ending anything.”
I especially love chapter 2 in this book, the chapter on pruning. This is just the thought producer I needed. Here is a little more about that chapter.
Dr. Cloud starts by using the analogy of a Rose Bush. The fact is that a Rose Bush needs to be pruned and sometimes severely in order to produce the most beautiful roses and many times just in order to survive the potential disease and so on. Not only do the dead branches need to be cut away, many times you have to prune buds that are perfectly healthy. The analogy is that in our business or in our own personal lives, we need to prune things that are keeping us from our best. Sometimes that means pruning or ending good things, they just aren’t the best things. What is it that you want out of your life? When you figure this out, you then have to prune the things, good and bad, that do not contribute to your goal. In my case this means pruning away the junk foods so that I can enjoy the healthy foods and so that I can enjoy a healthy life.
This book is about much more than my analogy of food and it is a good solid read. It really is though more for those who are looking for help in the area of maybe getting out of a bad relationship, one that is not good for you. It would even apply to churches who maybe hold on to things, programs, ministries that no longer work just because they have always done them. And in some cases they still work minimally but stand in the way of better things.
It’s a good read and offers much more that I have given you here.
Ronnie
