What Goes Around Comes Around

What Goes Around Comes Around

You reap what you sow: conditions, emotions, or circumstances that you create for others will come back to you multiplied.

As the laws of the universe have been set into motion by God, and he will not be mocked, you will reap what you sow. A simple code but easy to violate in ways that only hurt ourselves. We don’t always see it but do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

How much do you reap?

This story describes it best. A farmer sowed some seed, and some of the seed fell on the bad ground and did not grow. Birds ate some of the seed. Some of the seed came up but the sun scorched it, and then some seed was choked out by weeds. However, some of the seeds produced a harvest of 100 times more planted.

Would you be thankful that birds ate some of the terrible seed? That some were choked out by the sun or weeds? I am. There is no telling how this part of the law saved me from some unfortunate consequences.

When I set out in business, I was young, unwise, and prideful. By nature, I’m a driven person and build strong relationships. A leadership consultant said to me:

“Roger you get a lot done, but you don’t see the dead bodies scattered all around you.”

Hidden in her message was what I had sown. To the outside, I did not love people, and I saw them as obstacles to my goals.

I sowed a lot of poison thirty years ago, but I changed. However, some of the seed was still in the ground, and it took a while to work through what I had sown all those years before; the birds, the sun, and the weeds helped me, but some of the seeds returned multiplied.

The difficulty in working with this law of nature is that we don’t see the results immediately, and this makes it easy to miss the connection between the two. If sowing and reaping were like touching a hot iron, we would be more sensitive to our behavior toward others.

We reap in another season from the harvest

In Ukraine, where I spend the summer, Inna and I have a small grapevine, and her father makes wine each fall. Usually, the harvest is in late September, but this year, as I write this in the middle of October, the grapes are still not ready. Soon they will be, but the harvest is late this year, and the wine will be made later than last year.

When we plant vines, we do we do not reap in the same season that we harvest and sometimes the season of harvest is later than before.

Therefore, drawing on comparisons with the grape harvest, often the adverse events in our lives are the consequence - or the harvest - of something planted earlier, in a different season. It’s true, the time lag clouds the connection of the two events, and we are unaware that our actions often create the bad consequences experienced now, in this season.

The Chinese Bamboo Tree

When you plant the seed of the Chinese bamboo tree, no results appear for four years. Then in the fifth year, the tree grows about sixty feet in a few short weeks. With the bamboo tree, we witness that the season of reaping might occur years after sowing the seeds in the ground.

Like the grapevine, the bamboo tree exposes how the law exists in the natural world.

Visible and Invisible

The natural world is visible. The spiritual world is invisible. Everything that we see in the natural world is a reflection of what is in the spiritual world. Firstly, acts happen in the invisible realm and then manifest later in the visible realm.

A grapevine grows from one seed yet produces thousands of grapes year after year.

Similarly, one bamboo seed does nothing for four years and then explodes at a supernatural speed. What was happening in the ground? The establishment of roots to support a huge tree as it grew.

There is another lesson here: whatever is happening under our feet, in the ground, is unknown. If the harvest is going to prove successful, it may take time. So, don’t dig up the seed. Our role is to plant only. We are not in control of the harvest, only the sowing.

The bottom line

We are continuously sowing into the universe, and with that in mind, identify what you want to reap, and then sow diligently. If you want kindness, plant kindness. If you want people to be patient with you, be patient with others. If you want people to trust, you must trust others until you have a reason not to, and this is imperative in leadership.

If you sow disrespect, you will reap disrespect. If you sow arrogance, you will reap arrogance.

If you want a favorable environment for salespeople, to achieve this, create a climate favorable to the salesperson when you are the prospect. This concept is both easy to achieve, but also easy to abandon, and therefore, it requires awareness and diligence on our part.

In the next post, I’ll demonstrate with two examples from the HVAC industry that will further develop your knowledge of this fundamental law. In the long-term, your success will grow.