Bring Enough Of Yourself

One piece of gradually accumulated wisdom I’ve discovered over the years is this. If you’re not thriving in some particular realm of life where there are rich rewards to be had, you’re probably not bringing enough of yourself to it. It’s only full engagement in giving the best of yourself to something that unlocks the full bounty. As long as the pursuit is something that yields rich rewards, then full reward necessities full presence. I’d summarise it with a formula - something like this:

Whole Self × Fertile Field = Full Harvest

Whole Self is your engagement and effort, Fertile Field is a pursuit with rich rewards, and Full Harvest is the abundance you can experience as a result.

Take something like the great works of literature as an example. You harvest what you invest yourself in, so if someone claimed to be underwhelmed by the works of, say, Joyce, Proust or Woolf, it will likely reflect a set of individual limitations or hesitation to fully immerse themselves in the rich experience of the texts, which are very hard to argue as ‘underwhelming’ with a Whole Self investment. Of course, at this stage of life, there might well be perfectly understandable reasons why they haven’t brought enough of their own curiosity and attention to the reading, just as there might be perfectly good reasons why a young boy is still drawing matchstick houses instead of more sophisticated models, but that doesn’t undermine the formula.

The same is true of virtually all domains with a potentially Fertile Field – religion, philosophy, science, economics, psychology, politics, art, history – if you withhold your Whole Self from the engagement and understanding, you’re going to be devoid of the Full Harvest, and as a consequence, you are likely to experience only a fraction of the perspective, and miss out on the more profound riches that life has to offer.