There Is No Lemonade – by Aaron Templer

Ever hear the Hindu story about the tree that grants wishes? It’s a good one.

An uncle tells a group of kids that a banyan tree will grant any wish that they desire. They rush outside to the tree and excitedly make their wishes. But unexpectedly they find that the tree also gives a wish’s opposite. With candy comes stomachaches. With toys, boredom.

Hopelessly focused on end results – fruits of actions – the kids try to solve their dilemma by asking for bigger toys and sweeter candy. The opposite continues to follow: more boredom and stronger stomachaches.

As the kids get older they ask for wealth, power, money, fame. They get these things along with greed, insomnia, paranoia, anxiety. Some are convinced they aren’t wishing smart enough and keep trying. Some become frustrated and wish for death to end it all, only to be granted the opposite: rebirth, under the same tree, with the same level of awareness.

To some, this story is just an athletic way to say “be careful what you wish for” (who knows? maybe it’s the fountainhead for that saying). But I think it’s more sophisticated than that. For me, it’s a reminder that turning lemons to lemonade is a process. It rarely (if ever) has a well-defined end.

Long before creating our dual-independent life, my wife and I made many choices that set us up to live the life we strive for today. (My wife is the driver of this, by the way. Without her I’d live in a van down by the river. Forever adjusting my pants, barking about what you need to do to make a meaningful life.)

But without a doubt the most important part of our process is dedicating ourselves, everyday, to avoid the temptation of focusing on some kind of end result. We’re simply happiest when we aren’t focused on the fruits at all.

Not that there aren’t pragmatic, rational things that you need to deal with. There are. Savings, cost-cutting, spending discipline, life insurance. But they make the process possible. It’s the picking of lemons when you don’t feel like it. Getting up everyday to mix it. Sticking to the pure sugar when the bad stuff is more convenient.

I bring this up because for all the talk of changing the world by focusing on the passion you have within you, it’s all too tempting to focus on some kind of endless search for a result. If you work toward a rigid idea of a big payoff, the payoff will inevitably come in a different form than what you had in mind. You’ll be disappointed, and the cycle carries on. And on. And on.

The self-guided professionals I admire get up every day to pursue something in line with their own conscious, ignoring the pull from the fruits to the best of their ability. Lives that are simply led. Giving not back, but along the way instead.

Every now and then – especially when you’re starting – temptations arise that pull you away from a productive focus. Like when you see someone in your industry bullshitting and getting paid for it. How does that idiot make money and I’m scraping this month? How does that blowhard get the speaking gig and I’m stuck on the sidelines?

It’s a toxic focus on an end result – money, fame, position of authority. Recognizing that it’s all a process, my wife and I often help each other pull back from the temptation to judge, be jealous, and draw connections to what we’re doing wrong. If you decide to follow your passion and go it alone, you’ve got to — got to — find someone to help you expel that toxin from your system and bring you back to your idea of success. I’m not much of a sharey-emotionally kind of guy to be giving this advice (just ask my wife), but I don’t think you can do this part alone. I know I couldn’t.

Here’s another temptation that can derail you from focusing on the right things: Jealous people who try to strip you of your power. Anyone who’s gone it alone has experienced this. If you decide to unplug from the matrix, I’m warning you now that there will be people who will find a reason — and unhesitatingly tell you about it — why it is that you’re able to unplug and they can’t.

You have a spouse. You don’t have a spouse. Your spouse works. Your spouse doesn’t work. Your kids are young. Your kids are old. You got a severance. You didn’t get a severance.

Someone I considered a friend actually told me – out loud – that I was lucky to have a Sugar Momma. Crazy. I went from disbelief, to pissed, to confused. The guy clearly chose to forget what kind of professional my wife has chosen to be. Or what our life together actually is. (Or what it means to be a supportive friend for that matter.)

Support for a solo endeavor is a sophisticated thing. It flows in and out of relationships. Your partner might provide more support in one form or another at a particular point in time, but you’re sacrificing in other ways. (If you aren’t, you better. Fast.)

My wife and I sacrifice for a pretty simple notion of success. We went to the zoo together on a Tuesday once. Once we worked remotely together at my in-laws house for a day, and spent the night. And now that we’ve put skiing back in our life after cutting it as an unnecessary expense during cash-strapped startup time, we figured out that of all our ski days this year exactly zero were on a weekend. We followed the snow, not the prescribed days of the week.

Skiing provides another metaphor of our life together. My wife skis well. Really well. She has a passion for it, developed after years of coming to Colorado on vacation when she was a kid in the Midwest. When it came time to find a home after law school, she uprooted with little network support, took the Colorado bar, and set out to make a life for herself in an environment that provided her so many meaningful relationships. And also so she could ski.

She truly followed her heart. When I go skiing with her, I feel like I’m along for the ride. I almost get more joy from watching her do her thing during our days together on the slopes than I do from skiing itself.

This focus on the path and not the destination? Avoiding the wishing tree? It’s a bump run for me. It doesn’t come naturally. I try, and keep trying. And I experience moments of relative success here and there. But I probably would never have been aware of the run, how to get there, or how to prepare before hitting it if it wasn’t for my wife. She keeps me going in the proper direction.

There’s a Sugar Mamma for ya’. More like a Champagne Powder Mama.

Focusing on the money part of the equation also ignores the other, often more difficult and draining aspects of support that the people in your life will give you. Whatever kind financial support my wife has given me, sharing a paycheck will never test her resolve to the degree that my behavior and emotional bullshit does.

The courage to follow our passion and avoiding the temptation of the wishing tree comes in the form of discarding the Jones’s idea of success and never letting anyone strip us of the strength it took to do it in the first place.

And the more I learn to accept the gift that is my wife, the happier we both are.

It’s a process. Every moment of every day. Sometimes I go to the tree and wish for things. It’s inevitable. When I’m strong enough to seek support, I pull back and focus on what’s in front of me.

Because that’s all there ever is: What’s in front of us. There is no end. The means are all.

The banyan tree story ends with a kid who was disabled and couldn’t go outside to the wishing tree with his friends. He observed their behavior from afar. Pained to watch his friends in their doomed loop, he said that if he were under the tree he would wish that his friends would see the errors of their ways. That they’d understand that fruits of end-results only cause more pain and lead nowhere.

He gained Moksha from this, of course, and became one with the universe. An end result that can only be gained by not focusing on it at all.

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Aaron Templer (AT) mashes up leadership with strategy, branding and integrated marketing for clients in search of the why. aarontempler.com