What My Garden Taught Me About Vision & Commitment

Every year I plant a summer garden. Sometimes with seeds, sometimes from starts. Either way, I have to envision the mature plant before I even get started. Otherwise I wouldn’t know how much space to give each plant, how much water and fertilizer it needs, or whether it wants more sun or shade.

When I start with seeds, it takes time for them to sprout. Sometimes it looks like nothing is happening for a week or even two, but I keep watering the ground and picturing those tiny green shoots emerging from the wet soil—the vision is easy, but watering bare dirt every day while staring at zero evidence of progress is the part that actually grows the garden.

That’s where commitment comes in.
Vision without commitment goes nowhere.

It’s the same with manifesting a job, a house, anything else you want. Most things don’t show up right away. You have to keep watering the soil of your mind—focusing on the outcome, taking inspired action when the excitement moves you, not forcing it (forcing never works, on plants or on life).

Usually it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Just like with gardening, it’s always a bit of a gamble. But it always starts with a vision and it always leads to the next best thing—because, whether we get what we think we want or not, Life is always conspiring to support us.

What Happens when You Forget the Vision

Plants grow. Sometimes a lot.

Take trees.
You can drive around any town and you’ll find trees planted in exactly the wrong places—tangled in power lines, jammed against houses, pushing up concrete in sidewalks.

The people who planted them fell in love with a cute little tree, and failed to envision the enormous one it was planning to become.

Redwoods are a great example. They’re native to my neck of the woods and people plant them like ornaments. Beautiful, definitely—but capable of reaching over 300 feet, with a shallow root system that depends on the roots of its redwood neighbors just to keep it upright in a windstorm.

Plant one alone in a suburban yard as a cute little Christmas tree to string with lights, and a few decades later it might just introduce itself to your roof with a very loud bang.

The problem was never the tree. The problem was a lack of vision.

Same with those cute little borage volunteers in your carrot bed. Sure, they will make pretty blue flowers and they even have medicinal properties, but they will grow much faster than the carrots and sprawl all over the top of them until, pretty soon, you have a borage bed instead of a carrot bed.

That’s where a little vision can make a big difference. You can see where things are going and weed out the borage before it becomes a problem.

Life Is Like a Garden

I hope it’s obvious that this isn’t just about gardening. Most of us spend our days focusing on what’s right in front of us—the news, the electric bill, the lawn that needs mowing—and forgetting the wider picture we actually want for our lives… and our world.

It’s like focusing on the bare soil before the seeds sprout and thinking that’s all there is.

Maybe once a year or so we’ll make a vision board like it’s a one-time arts-and-crafts project—cut out a beach house, glue it next to a photo of abs you do not currently possess, and expect it to manifest on its own. But like the seeds you plant in your garden, manifestation doesn’t work that way.

You don’t plant once and walk off. You water soil that looks exactly like it looked yesterday, trusting that something’s happening below the surface even though you have zero direct evidence.

The Dirt Phase Isn’t Failure

The old hedgerow planters in Ireland and Britain planted oak, ash, and thorn for grandchildren they’d never meet. That’s a different kind of vision than “I’d like this resolved by Tuesday.” It’s vision with room in it for the long stretch where nothing seems to be sprouting and you keep watering anyway, because you already see the whole picture, not just this season’s harvest.

The old stories say the nature spirits already know what’s coming—they’re tending the bloom while we’re still out there squinting at dirt, unconvinced.

I don’t think they’re impatient with us. They’ve watched this part of the story plenty of times, and they know the dirt phase isn’t evidence of failure. It’s where the real work happens, completely out of sight, exactly on schedule.

If you’re in a dirt phase of your own right now—a project, a relationship, a version of you that’s forming but not yet visible—you’re not behind. You’re just growing underground.

Plant Seeds for the Future You Want

Gardening offers no guarantees, and neither does life. That’s never stopped me from planting anyway, because planting is an act of faith—not the blind kind, the visionary kind. It’s the willingness to act on what isn’t here yet as though it already matters—because it does.

So before you plant the next thing—a project, a habit, a business, a new version of yourself—it’s worth asking:

• Am I picturing the cute sapling, or the full-grown tree?
• Does this vision have room for the inconvenient parts, the root system, the slow years before there’s anything obvious to show?

While you’re asking, I’ll be celebrating my new little carrot seedlings, which, by the way, take quite a long time to sprout.

And There’s More

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