By Steve Pavlina

At a recent visit to the beautiful Keukenhof flower gardens in Holland, I learned about the practice of topping. As flowers grow, sometimes the growers cut off the tops of the flowers, which they believe causes the plants to invest more energy into flower growth and less into seed production. The expected result is flower buds that will produce higher quality flowers.

This is a nice analogy for personal growth as well. Sometimes when we produce preliminary results in a certain area, it can be helpful to cut them off and discard them. This can free up energy for a stronger attempt elsewhere instead of settling into the comfort zone of satisfaction with the old results.

After running my computer games business for 10 years and generating satisfying results with it, I decided to drop it and leave that field behind. This freed up my energy to focus on my personal development writing and speaking. If I’d kept running the old business, I’d have become more enmeshed in that field, planting more seeds there, so to speak. This would have meant less energy to invest in my new path and weaker results.

It can be difficult to choose the topping approach because you’re taking something that’s already reasonably satisfying and cutting it out of your life, in the hopes that something even better will grow in its place. But if you don’t do this, then you can easily stunt your future growth, causing more energy to be invested in planting ever more seeds around the old path. When you decline to make cuts, you effectively say: This is as good as it will ever be, so I’m going to settle myself here.

Do you want to settle where you are right now? If so, then topping is unnecessary. But if you’d like to do better and believe you have a good shot at improvement, just like the flower growers at Keukenhof, then topping is a sensible practice. To free up time and energy for future growth in new directions, you have to drop the merely satisfactory. This gives you a shot at the truly beautiful.