The Weed Perspective

Recently, I was working with Joe Timmins in order to explore the possibility of generating more business.  We discussed several different perspectives  including:  patience, scarcity, abundance, and uncertainty.  One perspective we hit on was growth.  We called it the “weed perspective”.

Now to some, the “weed perspective” may sound a bit strange, however, it resonated with me.  Joe and I talked about the fact that while we all love flowers; weeds grow and flowers wilt.  In fact, those you who tend a lawn or a garden know that weeds proliferate!  Imagine a world where your business proliferated like weeds.

Joe and I further explored how one can be around generating business from the weed perspective, as well as what one could do from that viewpoint.  Here are some of the ideas we generated in a fun, no-holds-barred, brainstorming session:

When generating business, some of the ways one can be:

-Beautiful

-Gnarly

-Plentiful

-Attractive

-Rooted

-Wild

-Fee

And, when generating business, some of the things one can do include:

-Multiply

-Grow

-Spread-out

-Pop-up

-Surprise

Well, you get the picture (and if you don’t, just go out to your backyard and look around).  The point of an exercise like this is to rattle the mental cages in order to get unstuck from a particular way of seeing a situation.  By working with someone to examine different perspectives around a particular problem, and by selecting a perspective that resonates, sometimes new ideas can be generated, and it is becomes possible to make choices that were previously unavailable.

After all, what is a weed?  In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, it is “a plant whose virtues have never been discovered.”