Seed or Weed? The Question That Changed How I Say Yes

On time, energy, and why some decisions rot your whole garden.

I was listening to Melissa Wood’s latest podcast with Jay Shetty while driving to give a talk to some college creative writers, and had to pause it midway to voice-memo my friend to repeat what Jay was saying.

Essentially, Melissa asked him about his spiritual practices, and he outlined this simple visualization he does every day to evaluate the decisions he’s making—both large and small—from huge business deals to how he’s engaging in the more minute ways of life (that all matter and shape our direction, by the way!).

He said that every day he visualizes each decision as either planting a seed—something that will grow in his garden of life into something beautiful, shade-giving, nutritive, and a helper in the broader ecosystem of things—or a weed—something that seems small and insignificant at the time of planting but will ultimately spread and create a toxic environment in the garden. A weed becomes a nuisance, and ultimately doesn’t work for the kind of ecosystem aligned with one’s deeper intention.

Of course, this metaphor called to mind my earlier post about Fountains and Drains, which has been a useful image for me over the years and is the founding principle of The Fountain, but something about this idea of seeds and weeds hit even closer in terms of how I’ve been thinking about the value of my time lately.

For a long time as a young writer, I felt I couldn’t say no to requests because I was still cutting my teeth, trying to establish myself in a broader community. In my early twenties, it felt like you never knew what something might become. This led me to some great places and great friendships, but it also led me to exhaustion, poverty, and the general sense that I was not on the right path.

I had the deeply-worn belief that it was my job to unearth the jewels inside of people—that if I just kept showing up to coffee dates or obligations (that intuitively didn’t feel aligned to me, but I bulldozed right past that), eventually it would lead to something great. That I’d get to the deeper layers of a person, or be rewarded with some opportunity I just couldn’t miss out on. I kept knocking on doors that were the wrong doors, thinking that if I just worked harder at it, something redemptive might be revealed.

This is sweet to think back on, and I know it was actually a vital part of my becoming—but still. You don’t know what you don’t know.

I kept chipping away at familial relationships that left me depleted and confused, that required me to wear a mask to be accepted and loved, and (unknowingly) kept me in a state of fight or flight. I didn’t yet see that I was watering my weeds over and over, expecting different results.

Professionally, I barked up the wrong trees for a long time—teaching for no security and hardly any pay, despite having a master’s degree and the right qualifications. I really absorbed the message that this is just the way it has to be for a writer. And in one reality, it is true. This is the way it is. My pride wouldn’t let me accept that I could’ve been making more money and writing more had I been a waitress somewhere, but I digress.

I kept holding out that something was going to come from all my adjuncting. And I guess in some ways, something did: it made me on fire to find a way to teach the way I want to teach, on my own platform, in my own way.

It doesn’t help that our industry is built on the back of free labor masked as altruism. Writers do not get paid for the hours they spend reading and preparing for an author talk at a bookstore. We don’t get paid for reading and blurbing books. And very often we are sorely undercompensated for teaching for institutions. The amount of times I’ve been asked to do something very time-consuming—only to find after several email exchanges that there will be no pay involved—are too many to count.

And for a long time, it seemed that that’s just the way it had to be.

Recently, a writer penned a deal for $8 million for each of 5 books. That’s eight million times five. You do the math. Of course, this is an example of a wild swing where one writer gets an astronomical amount that, if spread more widely, could fund a great many writers’ lives. Let me pause to say it’s hard not to acknowledge this reality when most writers I know are feeling pressure to say yes to free labor, to market their own books, to plan and pay for their own tours, and to juggle all variations in between.

I look at the shelf at the bookstore, knowing one book sold for five thousand dollars and one sold for a million (or 8 million in this case), and I cannot for the life of me tell you what makes that million dollar book better than the five thousand dollar one. It’s generally not literary merit. I say this as one example of how all of this adds to the sense of confusion in operating a career that makes sense in a world that simply doesn’t. And I think adds to the difficulty in making decisions, knowing what’s a seed or a weed at any given time.

But that’s not what I’m getting at here. I’m all about solution and making the most of what I can of something, despite the odds. I love to see a writer—especially a woman—get a shit ton of money. And I have a feeling this writer is a great advocate for herself and had to learn hard and fast about seeds and weeds. I love that she got that deal because it knocks down the idea that money can’t be made in writing—it most certainly can, and you should be asking for it. It’s expansive to the rest of us (once we get past the utter disorientation).

I won’t promise you a book deal like this if you tend to your garden, but I can promise that saying yes to things that are weeds and not seeds will not lead to success.

Sometimes money can make something that might be a weed into a seed. (But not always, of course.)

Here’s an example where money made something a seed for me: