Growth in 2025: Fruitfulness or Productivity?

Why living with greater fruitfulness (not just productivity) should be a goal for 2025.

My favorite season in California is the summer. From mid-July until early December, there are abundant offers of fruit: Please take my persimmons! Want some plum jam? How about 10 punnets of tomatoes? 10 pounds of melons? Dried apples?

Yet year after year, harvest season still surprises me because the months preceding are full of waiting. If you’re impatient and growth-minded like me, plants seem to grow agonizing slowly. Green tomatoes might be on the branch for weeks before the onset of the slightest shade of red. If you try to keep track of progress daily, you’ll get discouraged.?

Then suddenly, as if in the blink of an eye, there is too much harvest to handle: abundance to give away and more to store, preserve and save for the winter seasons.?

Fruitfulness versus Productivity: the difference

Recently, I’ve been struck by the difference between fruitfulness (how nature grows), and productivity (how we humans tend to define growth).?

• I like to be productive: to see the measurable outcomes of my actions on a day-to-day (or at least month-to-month) basis, to ensure that there is the highest leverage for time spent, to continue building upon successes of earlier seasons.
• In this context, planting and harvesting feel counterintuitive. For months, your efforts are literally? “fruit-less”. Sometimes you’re waiting to the point of giving up. You continue to water, weed, fertilize and chase squirrels away. One day, the harvest is explosive, and then the entire plant dies as the frost sets in. The cycle restarts.

How might we integrate more of the "fruitfulness paradigm" into our lives?

Fruitfulness: Changing our timeframes?

Some things in life require the paradigm of fruitfulness, such as the incubation of long-term dreams and life missions, the cultivation of trust in long-term relationships; even the formation of our characters.?

These aspects of life hit closer to our fundamental identities and who we are, not just what we do. In these areas, there won't be linear progress where one unit of effort consistently leads to two (or a hundred) units of output. There will be stages of instability, even the feeling of going backwards and hope deferred.??

The fruitfulness paradigm will tell you that growth which is invisible to the eye is often the most foundational growth of all. The roots and trunk of a tree determine how much weight it can carry.?

It might prompt you to take a little more time to judge a circumstance, ask for help in the waiting, define success in a more internally-referenced way, and allow “grace and circumstances [to act] on your own good will”, as extracted from one of my favorite poems from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881-1955):

And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)will make of you tomorrow.

In contrast, the productivity paradigm might cause us to try to judge success or failure prematurely, with greater reference to what others’ think and want than our own call and journey in life. In haste, we might sometimes give up things that we value more to meet our need for external validation.?

Fruitfulness: Allowing seasons of loss and renewal?

In the productivity paradigm, we’re always after the best bang for our buck; leverage for our time. Letting go of past seasons feels like a waste, or even a failure. Yet, plants seemingly lose everything before the fruitfulness cycle begins again.?

In my work with people in transition, we talk about how to “graduate well from past seasons” - leaving a job by choice or circumstance, moving geographies or industries, changing your relationship to work when new caregiving responsibilities arise.

In these times of transition, we need to simultaneously hold celebration for the harvest of the past season and grief over the loss of what we knew.

Often, leaving past seasons behind is the only way to create room for renewal. Perhaps, like a seed, some time of dormancy is needed in-between. A good friend shared this concept of seed dormancy:

“Seed dormancy can be defined as the state or a condition in which seeds are prevented from germinating even under the favorable environmental conditions for germination. The main reason behind these conditions is that they require a period of rest before being capable of germination.” Source here.

In the fruitfulness paradigm, there are seasons – Abundant Harvest. Death. Dormancy. Slow Growth. Abundant Harvest. And it begins again.

Some reflection questions

The productivity paradigm is still useful in many things in life. After all, we still have to show up at work, produce beautiful products and services, lead our teams, parent our children and serve our community - all within 24 hours!?

Yet, some of the most valuable things in our lives require the fruitfulness paradigm – longer timeframes of investing, cooperating with season changes: loss and renewal, waiting and harvest. I’ve been a gardener for eight years now, and finally notice myself starting to enjoy the process: even the agonizingly slow days where all I did was pull out a couple of weeds.?

As we enter 2025, let’s aim for fruitful growth, as much as we aim for productivity. Here are some questions to consider:

1. What am I waiting for and investing in that is slower to show results than normal? What do I need to help me in the waiting?
2. In what areas of my life are seasons changing? What do I need to grieve and celebrate so that I can cooperate with the new season that’s coming?
3. In what areas of life do I need to be more effortful, and where do I need to slow down and appreciate the “period of rest before being capable of germination?”

How to engage:

Inherent Journey runs workshops to help women and men navigate transitions and adversities in their work and life journeys with practical tools, evidenced-based design and empathy.?

Ways to engage:

1. Navigating shifting seasons. We work with employers and community leaders to help employees navigate shifting work/life seasons with confidence. We've work in organizations including Google, AirBnB, LinkLaters with satisfaction scores consistently exceeding 95%. Reach out to me if you’d like to learn about bringing us in virtually or in-person.
2. Navigating challenging seasons at work. If you are based in the U.S., you can sign up for our programs running from Feb-June 25 here. Our Programs in Asia will be launched in the second half of the year.?
3. Subscribe to www.inherentjourney.org to be the first to find out about our new programs, which are consistently oversubscribed.?
4. We offer limited spots in a 1:1 “pivotal moments” coaching program (3 sessions over 8 weeks), providing extra help and resources to make a successful transition in season.