Are you a bonsai or a sunflower?
There is one struggle that I keep coming back to when I think about building a personal brand in the wild and wooly world of Social Media. That is the struggle to keep your eyes on your own prize, whatever that may be, to keep your feet on your own path, whatever THAT may be, and to not let yourself get distracted by what everyone else is doing.
This is pretty hard, because let’s face it, in the world of Social Media, all you really see is what other people are doing. Most especially, you see and hear about the things that people are getting rewarded for. It can make you wonder if you’re really doing things the “right” way. Of course, there is no right way. There’s just your way. But still, it’s hard to remember that every day.
This is not an abstract line of thought for this here blogger. After 11 months of blogging, I have reached levels of success I could not have imagined even six months ago, when it seemed like getting comments was like getting a rational sentence out of Charlie Sheen – possible but not highly likely. On the other hand, my blog does not attract huge crowds, and I have seen other people who have been doing this for not much longer than me skyrocket to levels of success far beyond where I am. I keep asking myself if I am really okay with that. Maybe you are asking yourself similar questions.
For me, it all comes down to whether you are a bonsai or a sunflower.
The sunflower
The sunflower is really a pretty amazing plant. It starts as nothing but a seed in the spring, but by July, that little seed can evolve into a plant that is 6 feet high. It can have leaves as big as your hand (or as big as your head), and the flower itself is gigantic. It sprouts up and zooms past the other plants in the garden, reaching for that huge golden globe in the sky that makes it grow.
If you’re a sunflower, you want to find ways to grow fast. You are reaching for increasingly high levels of success, and even though you start out on the same level as other people, you measure your success, in part, by how small those other folks start to look as you grow ever upwards.
If you’re a sunflower, your great big flower opens up and outshines everyone else around you. In fact, some of those around might not even have buds yet. You’re out there in the open catching all of the sun, all of the delicious rain, and everything else that being the biggest and the best can get you.
The thing about a sunflower, though, is that sometimes the flower part, with all of those seeds, can get too heavy for that stem. Because the sunflower grows so fast, its roots aren’t very deep. When you get to those heavy rains and thunderstorms in August, all of that weight on top of that giant flower, supported only by that one stalk, can sometimes be too much. Sometimes sunflowers bend over and break from all of that weight.
The bonsai
The practice of bonsai is a polar opposite of the sunflower. For a bonsai tree, the goal is not to grow up towards the sun. The goal is to become an organic statue – to fulfill a certain shape, a certain design. Sometimes, as a bonsai starts to grow, it gets clipped, because those branches or tendrils aren’t growing the right way or in the right direction. The art of bonsai is painstaking and slow and it takes years and years of patience to start to see the benefits of all of that work.
Plants that are used for the art of bonsai are not really as showy as sunflowers are. They’re kind of utilitarian in appearance, really. Simple brown trunk and branches, little dark green leaves. There’s no splash of color. Often even the bonsai pot is natural looking and simple. But with a lot of patience, a lot of tender loving care, and a lot of nurturing, that bonsai can become something beyond just a ficus plant. It can become a work of art.
Neither way is right or wrong
How you choose to approach Social Media is truly your choice, and what you come to realize is that you can only be happy in Social Media, or in life, if you follow the path that you are most comfortable traveling. A lot of people in Social Media choose the sunflower way. That achievement, that moment of glory, is seductive.
The bonsai way does not offer immediate fulfillment. Far from it. And boy, those sunflowers sure can look tall when you’re just wrapping yourself around a metal wire an inch at a time. But if you are a ficus plant, you’re not meant to be a sunflower, and if you’re a sunflower, no one is going to be able to train you into a living statue.
Which way are you going?
Are you a sunflower? Are you a bonsai? Perhaps you’re another kind of plant altogether.
I’d love to hear about it.
1st image credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/dlockeretz
2nd Image credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/buzzt.
3rd Image by Brian Corll. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/bcorll
14 Comments
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Hello Marjorie,
Good to be back here again. I like the plant comparison and quite frankly, I’m neither.
I would’ve have preferred a rose, but because of my male egotistical self, I chose:
Cactus.
See, they both have plenty of thorns..
I really can’t help it. Although when I write for others I tend to be more fun, back there in my home blog I tend to be dull, dreary, and sometimes painful.
My dad was a lawyer and I practically grew up with this, how do I call it, umm, “in your face”, no not really, hmmm, “objection your honor” er, not quite, there, there found it –
Measured and combative style.
I think I got that right.
Sometimes, I feel like a weed though. I tend to grow everywhere and get plucked out sometimes or even chopped, mulched and then composted.
😀
Aww, you don’t seem thorny to me! I love your writing!
You know, though, roses and cacti are quite different. Roses need lots and lots of care while cacti quite prefer to be left alone. Something to that, non? 🙂
Gee, nobody said that before to me, thanks for the compliment. 🙂
Aye, a cactus’ personality I might have. Hoping to change that one small thorn a day 🙂
Margie
This is very loaded. As a blogger we want to rise to the top. We want our articles to be found, shared, commented upon as that inspires us to do better. We want to be noticed but at the same time that part of us called integrity comes out. If I share you will you share me? Does that play a role? Sure it does. Should it? Nah, but we are human and that does matter. We build communities treating people better than we want to be treated and hope we surround ourselves with people that share that same sentiment but we know that is so not true.
There are some that grow to the sunflower by asking for the favor where the bonsai’s of the world grow by consistently writing great content that many times does not get read. It is discouraging but are we here to sell our soul for a retweets, comments and traffic. Some are and some want to but that integrity within us creeps up. Growing social media is being there before the sale. Being there before we have to sell our souls but in the grand scheme of it, if we do not sell our souls and ask for that retweet, are we going to achieve the success and that we want to build the foundation to meet the standards we have set for ourselves?
Can we grow without sacrificing our integrity? It is a slower process but we have to think about what we can control (interesting I have so heard that somewhere and it is by far the most sound advice). We cannot necessarily control who reads the blog, we cannot control who retweets it but we can control what we write, what we do with what we write and how we put ourselves out there. If I retweet someone 10x and they never retweet me are they someone I should abandon? Some would, I will not as well I the one that always believes someday they will connect with what I created and find it worthy of sharing with their audience (then again I am the same one that swore up and down, left and right that I would get an A with a professor and took 5 classes with him which got me my only 5 B’s … ahem; thought I regularly got the highest grades on papers. Moral do not give me a test, I fold).
I think there is a sunflower and bonsai in all of us. We want to achieve the sunflower but yet with the strength of the bonsai, while eventually growing into that mature pine that stands proudly for years on end (until it grows too high and they come and chop it to put it in Rockerfeller Plaza for so many to adorn in its final days before it becomes wood chips and becomes the role model for others).
I would be delighted if you used this comment and made it your own take on this issue on your site. I think you would blow people away far more than I did.
*smush*
Very well put Suzanne. 🙂
Beautiful metaphor!
I want to be English Ivy. Ever try to remove English Ivy, once it overtakes are area?
As a matter of fact, I have!
That’s a great analogy too 🙂
I absolutely love this analogy – what a great way to paint a picture of a very real concept in social media. In particular I connected with how it’s so easy to be distracted by what everyone else is doing – their successes and activities. You have to keep site on what really matters – find and deliver the substance that’s sustaining. I lean more towards the Bonsai – the 10,000 hours it takes for mastery. Sunflowers are exuberant and fun and we need that too. How about a hybrid – Bonsai with 3 dashes of Sunflower? The oomph that gives color and texture to the meat so to speak.
The Bonsai speaks to the craft of writing and communicating – paying attention to the details that help you cut through the noise which gets ever louder. In the field of typography, Doyald Young (http://www.idsgn.org/posts/remembering-doyald-young/) bucked the trends in digital typography and focused on the craft. I felt privileged to meet him a few years ago and left inspired. Same goes for here!
Thanks so much, Patrick. I really appreciate that.
I agree that this is probably not a black-and-white choice. You can bring elements of both. There are risks to both paths and there are advantages to each path. I also tend towards the bonsai, but you’re right, some sunflowery exuberance never hurts 🙂
Got here from Chris Brogan’s blog, if you are interested. I was immediately taken by your choice of comparison as they are two things that are summarily different, and yet both bloom to be beautiful. And they are two of my favorites. Great Metaphors.
Mike
Thanks Mike! Sure, I always love to know how people find me 🙂
Glad you liked the post, and thanks for coming by!
Good grief. I think I am a plastic fern….
Great post, Margie. xoxo molly
[…] I am going for. The idea actually came from something my friend Bob James said in response to my Bonsai & Sunflower post earlier this week. He said he thought of himself as ivy – crawling everywhere. Shortly […]