“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.” Robert Louis Stevenson

Do not judge your day by the rewards you receive but by the efforts you put into it. In other words, do not judge the day by the results or outcomes, but rather by the honest efforts and hard work you put into it. One of the most important factors to success is patience. The wisdom is to know that great results take time. Nothing happens overnight, keep putting in the work, it’s the small and consistent steps that lead to great results. 

Our daily actions define the outcome. The way we spend our time impacts everything, including the end results. The fact is that the expected results are not going to appear in the absence of efforts. One simply can’t hope for greater results without putting in great hard work, smart planning and execution. 

Even after giving you 100 per cent, it will test your patience level to get the expected results. The seeds you plant are more important than the harvest you reap. It’s a sad reality that no one appreciates the efforts, only the final outcome or results are appreciated, mostly no one would ever admire the efforts that you’ve put in. But, isn’t it that there is nothing like failure as long as the goal is realistic enough and when one continues to keep improving by learning from the mistakes and by sticking to the roadmap or adapting to the change?

No matter what you do, in the end, you’re going to be judged by others. So it might make sense to keep up, continue and believe in putting into others and efforts and keep practising patience. But there is nothing wrong with receiving feedback from others and implementing it in case it makes sense to you.

But always make sure that your goals are backed by proper planning and education. Sowing seeds is a wonderful metaphor for our lives. When we sow good seeds through our behaviour, like real seeds, they will sometimes sprout underground dormant; the fruits of our labours typically don’t sprout immediately. But if we are patient and wait in faith, where we have planted good seeds, we eventually will have good results.

For example: we daily plant seeds in our relationships with our words. Significantly, the results of our “spoken seeds” aren’t always readily apparent. Let’s say that I say something cruel to you and I hurt your feelings. Perhaps you may pretend to brush off the comments, but in the back of your mind, you know that I have the potential for cruelty. And the “cruelty seed” I’ve planted will now grow into the distance between us. 

However, let’s say that you are feeling down today, I see you are vulnerable, so I give you a pep talk. I tell you how great you are. I remind you of all your successes and good qualities. I tell you that I believe in you and know that you are going to do great things in the future. What will happen to the “encouragement seeds” that I have sown? I won’t know immediately. You will likely do no more than thank me politely for the kind words. Nevertheless, I’ve sown good seeds in our relationship; I’ve shown myself to be trustworthy with your feelings. I am now someone you will turn to when you need a boost. And our relationship will go to a whole new level. 

We don’t only sow seeds with our words. We sow seeds with our actions. The simplest example of this is in our finances. We sow good seeds when we spend our money responsibly, save a portion and give another portion to help others. Of course, we will not immediately see the growth of our financial seeds, but if we continue to act responsibly with what we earn before we know it, we will have useful things like a healthy savings account. 

By contrast, what if we spend irresponsibly and keep every penny for ourselves, sure, spending as much as we earn may not seem as much of a problem when things are going smoothly. But our "irresponsible seeds" eventually will grow into financial instability. And when we have an emergency or when the economy takes a downturn, we will be in crisis. We also sow seeds in our health. Today, if I smoke, eat junk and don’t exercise, probably nothing much will happen, I’ll go on living the same as I always have. However, if I do those things for years, at some point, I will become overweight and have serious health issues. Those “bad habit seeds” will catch up with us. 

Now, if I eat healthy food, limit my alcohol intake and exercise regularly, I also won’t see immediate results. But by having good habits over the living term, I am planting the seeds for good health in the future with these seeds. Chances are that not only will I live longer, but I will feel significantly better while I am alive. 

• Silia Junior is a Year 12 student at the Mata Ae Vave College and this literary piece won her first prize in the Year 13 English category of the Samoa Observer Short Story Competition.