This is part 5 in the series: RESILIENCE
Stress is necessary for success
All of you are saying, “Oh. I wish I didn’t have any stress in my life. If I didn’t have any stress, my life would be good.” No. If you didn’t have any stress in your life, you’d be dead. Every one of us needs an optimal amount of stress in order to function well. Without stress we will die.
Without stress we will die.
How many of you are able to keep poinsettias from Christmas to February? Most of you can’t. I can’t either. By the end of New Year’s Day football games, if the plant is still alive, I feel like I have succeeded. Why is it that poinsettias are so hard to keep alive? It’s because they’re tropical plants. How do we get them in the winter then? Because they are hot house flowers. Growers use timers to make sure the poinsettias get a specific amount of light for a specific period of time. In order for us to get these poinsettias, they have to be grown in a greenhouse that has shutters on it. The shutters are set to open and close at certain times of the day, that way the poinsettias have just the right amount of light so they’ll turn red at Christmas.
You can’t keep your poinsettia alive because you don’t look at your watch and say, “Oh. It’s 5:30, time to put the poinsettia in the closet.” Then at precisely 7 1/2 hours later, “It’s time to take it out of the closet.” Most of us don’t have a precisely temperature controlled environment to keep them alive. So you see, we can’t keep poinsettias alive because they are fragile plants. We love our poinsettias, but to keep them alive can take too much effort. They’re hot house flowers. They require a particularly protected environment to thrive.
…(if we want to be sturdy), hardy, and able to bounce back from adversity, we can’t live in an protected hot house.
What’s a plant that survives without much care? A cactus. Weeds thrive in bad environment because they are designed for that, they are adaptive to bad environments. That’s why you see dandelions growing up out of sidewalks, not poinsettias. They don’t require care and they are hardy. What is it that we call mums? They are called “hardy mums.” The reason is because they can bounce back from adversity. If we have to take too much care of something, it will not thrive. If we want something to be sturdy (if we want to be sturdy), hardy, and able to bounce back from adversity, we can’t live in an protected hot house. We can’t always just stay stress free and safe. There has to be adversity. The higher the maintenance the plant (or person) the less resilient it is.
