The Cherry Stone

You cannot force a tree to bear fruit. You can choose the spot, prepare the soil, water it, protect it from pests and prune it in good time.

Between effort and result there almost always remains an area we do not control.

This applies to raising children, relationships, careers, health, creative work and business.

Good conditions raise the probability but give no guarantee. A child remains a separate person. Someone you love can leave. The right project can land at the wrong moment.

Acknowledging this does not make the effort pointless. It helps you judge yourself by the quality of your decisions rather than claim all the credit for success and all the blame for failure.

We are responsible for the planting and the care. The weather is not in the job description, though it sometimes behaves like a line manager.

The difference between the quality of a decision and the quality of an outcome is clearest in medicine. A doctor who chose the right approach sometimes loses the patient. A doctor who could not be bothered to order a test most often loses nobody — because there was nothing dangerous there in the first place. Judged by outcome alone, the second comes out better than the first, and that is exactly how most conversations about doctors, schools, investments and bosses are arranged. The outcome is louder than the process, because it can be seen without any preparation.

Judging yourself by the harvest is pleasant right up to the first bad year. Judging by the quality of the planting is duller but reproducible: it is the only part of the work you can repeat next season.