My friend Jill’s backyard is exploding right now with fruit.

Strawberries, Marion berries, raspberries, and two kinds of cherries are ripening faster than she (and willing friends like me) can pick.

Yesterday afternoon, she invited me to come over to harvest the day’s bounty.

In about an hour, we picked what is pictured in the photo here.

Of course, not every berry made it into the bowl. There’s no better time to eat a piece of fruit than the moment it’s been plucked from the branch or vine, and we made sure to enjoy the fruits of our labor as we were laboring.

Business Lesson #1

The secret to picking berries was revealed to me as a girl growing up with loads of raspberry bushes in my backyard. There were some summer days when several quarts of fat, juicy raspberries made it into our kitchen where my Mom would make all manners of delicious raspberry based things including jam and compote. Had we not known the secret, however, our harvest would have been reduced by at least half.

The secret to a successful berry pick is to lift up the leaves once all the obvious exposed berries are picked. More of each bush’s bounty can be found beneath the canopy of green foliage than above. This is true across the board: raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries often reveal giant ripe fruit only to the hands that know where to look.

Yet to the novice or uninformed berry picker, once all the obvious fruit has been plucked, it’s time to move on to a new bush.

How often is the same principle going on for us in our businesses?

How many times have we missed the biggest, juiciest pieces of fruit because we were too busy to learn the art of picking or worse — didn’t know to lift up the leaves?

Business Lesson #2

As I stood on the ladder reaching for a clump of cherries above my head, a bird started making a huge racket. I couldn’t see it, but I sure heard it and let me tell you — it was not happy that I was messing around in what it probably viewed as its cherry tree with its cherries.

Hearing that bird making such a fuss reminded me of one of my favorite stories the late Jim Rohn used to tell. In it, his reference to the birds getting some of the seeds a farmer plants is one of my favorite analogies of all time about business and life. Birds getting some of the seeds is simply the natural order of things, and if you go chasing the birds that take some of your seeds, you leave the field and miss out on the best opportunity of all.

Over the years of my entrepreneurial life, I have been known to chase some birds.

The outcome was always the same, too.

I left the field and paid the price of neglecting what I needed to pay most attention to: the seeds that the birds hadn’t taken.

Business Lesson #3

As a girl, I didn’t mind venturing out to the raspberry thickets to pick berries by myself. But if the truth be told, it was always way more fun when someone was picking with me.

When my brother and I picked together, we competed to see who could not only pick the most berries, but also who could find the biggest berry. We somehow got it into our heads that finding the biggest berry was the crowning achievement for that day, and always needed our parents to determine whose biggest berry was truly the biggest of the day.

Diplomatic to their core, Mom and Dad made the judging process as fair as possible, getting out rulers to measure length and girth of the two contest entries. I suspect that over the years, my brother and I each won about the same number of times.

Picking berries and cherries with Jill made me realize how much I like the act of harvesting, especially with another person. Not only does the process go faster, but it’s just more fun.

Building a Bountiful Business

While many people balk at the idea of spending an afternoon “laboring in the fields” to get what they can drive to the local market to buy, I see the process as part of the reward you get at the end of it all — a tasty treat made all the sweeter because it was earned with people who matter to us.

There’s a reason popular motivational speakers of the past like Jim Rohn and Zig Ziglar were fond of making references to farming in their talks: the universal laws of Nature are inescapable no matter what we choose to do with our lives.

As we go about building our businesses, it’s important to keep these business lessons in mind. If we pick only the fruit that’s obvious to us; if we try to do everything ourselves; if we let the birds bother us and chase them in an effort to get back the seeds they take from our field…what we bring home in our baskets at the end of the day won’t be anywhere close to what we may have dreamed we would have.

Better to let the birds do what they’re going to do anyway, take the extra time and energy to lift up the leaves, and work alongside others to get the results we really want.