You never know the full aspects of what you have at your disposal unless you actively search all your options and alternatives. That being said, what is one thing that you do right now or a tool at your disposal that you can investigate further to discover all it has to offer?
In this episode of Freedom In Five Minutes, we talk about how to grow a business in a variety of unexpected ways by uprooting all the different possibilities that the tools at your disposal have to offer.
Overview & Episode Content
- Do You Know What a Food Forest Is?
- Know the Difference Between Your Seedlings and Weeds
- Be Well Informed About a Tool Before Dismissing It
- You Have to Know All the Alternative Solutions for Your Business
Do You Know What a Food Forest Is?
For about a year now, I have been doing a lot of research on food forests.
Food forests are like woods but a food forest is essentially utilizing mother nature’s way of growing edible stuff. You can grow lettuce, cabbage, beans, fruit trees, and a wide variety of different food in a food forest.
The concept is awesome and it works! There are tons of stuff out there that show you how to grow a food forest. So, I started planting. I bought seeds off of Amazon. My idea is to create a survival/herb garden. I have thousands of seeds worth about $45. And these seeds are non-GMO, which is great.
On the flip side, I got those same seeds for my wife and we both started planting. I planted the seeds to start growing a food forest. She, on the other hand, planted her seed on our garden enclosure. The garden enclosure was all thanks to her handy-dandy loving husband. No scavenging critters can get in the garden enclosure with two-foot-high raised garden beds so my wife does not have to bend over when planting the seeds or harvesting food.
When we started planting, there was one thing I noticed — something that my wife knew right away. We are not experts at gardening and we do not know what the seedlings look like — the things we just planted.
One of the things that were going to be a problem was discerning the weeds from the food seedlings.
Know the Difference Between Your Seedlings and Weeds
My wife had a clever solution. She put up these cute little signs that had drawings of the food we planted. The signs had illustrations of kale, lettuce, broccoli, spinach, beans, and other things we planted.
The little signs were perfect! We were able to know exactly what the heck we planted in a particular garden bed. And as things started growing, we knew what the seedlings looked like, and removing the weeds made it very easy.
I, on the other hand, went to my food forest and utilized trees that were already there. You can utilize trees in areas that are already good to make a food forest because you need to have different layers that consist of larger trees, dwarf trees, bushes, and so on.
I was utilizing all these areas by planting my seeds all over the place in a variety of ways. Later on, I realized that — in my infinite wisdom — I sowed the seeds in a place where a lot of weeds grow.
For example, there is food that naturally grows here called miner’s lettuce. Now, if you did not know what it was, you would think it was just some weed. But this is a natural food that grows in the wild.
Miner’s lettuce is a tender rosette-forming plant that has a pair of leaves connected together around each stem so as to appear as a single circular leaf. You can take the vitamin-C rich stem and leaves to eat and it is really good for you.
So, if you cannot distinguish if a plant is a weed or not, you run the risk of destroying the productive stuff.
Be Well Informed About the Tool Before Dismissing it
A few weeks ago, I was on the phone with a client. He was very anti new technology, very anti-Google Docs, very anti-Google Drive. Because he has done everything the old way.
He spent three hours writing a document on Google Docs — which you should never do, by the way, but he was in that mode of doing it. Although, he did admit that he has a habit of manually writing all his processes in documents.
That is not how you should do it. The documentation should be written based on a video that somebody else recorded. But he knows it is his old habit and he is trying to beat it.
Now, he went back to Google Docs and could not find the document anymore. It had disappeared. Now, he wanted to get rid of Google Docs from his system.
“I’m tired of Google Docs, I’m done with it. It’s horrible,” he said.
The reason he felt that way was because he did not know anybody that could tell him that Google Docs has a Version History that keeps a record of all the changes you made on the document.
So, I sent him a how-to video that showed him how to access the Version History and check out the changes he made. That is one tiny little benefit of Google Docs out of tons of other benefits.
Because he did not know about any of that, he could have easily uprooted the entire system he was building simply because he thought that Google Docs was a weed. Without the right information, a person can easily dismiss a great tool as a bad product for the business that was more of a hindrance than a help. It is the same thing that goes in my garden.
You Have to Know All the Alternative Solutions for Your Business
If I do not have the right information about the food I planted, then I run the risk of making massive mistakes. I could harvest my crops too early or at the wrong season. Or worse, I could mistake my seedlings as weeds! If I do not know any of these things and do not understand them, then I am screwed.
One of the big things that we have to do as business owners, and as people in general, is to know rather than just trusting other people to tell us what to do. We have to know the things that are around us.
I realized that a big disadvantage of people who live in the city is that they are not close to their food, natural shelter, warmth, and natural drinking water.
As soon as you move out into the country, you have to get very intimate with stuff like that. You have to start understanding because it is a matter of life and death or massive discomfort and comfort.
When you are starting a business, you have to see all of the options and alternatives that you have. As soon as you do, you are going to be informed. You will know when something is a benefit and when something is not.
Conclusion
What are you using in your business right now that you really have not fully looked into yet? We get this all the time with clients who work with our Virtual Systems Architects — clients who tend to have only one way of using VSAs and that is it.
It is one of the reasons why we are building a community for all of our clients so that we are able to grow their business in a variety of ways that they did not expect.
What is the one thing that you are doing today that you need to investigate and discover the different possibilities?
I challenge you to go and discover the aspects of what you have at your disposal. Once you do that, you are going to find that there are many things that you were not considered after all. And these are things that could potentially benefit your business today.
Resources and Links
This is Dean Soto, Founder of Freedom In Five Minutes. Go check out FreedomInFiveMinutes.com and ProSulum.com there are lots of cool stuff over there.
Check them out and I will see you in the next Freedom In Five Minutes podcast episode.