I realized I was holding an apple tree in the palm of my hand. A little seed with the potential to become a beautiful big tree—a tree that could grow thousands of apples in its lifetime. Thousands of apples, each containing several seeds, each capable of growing a new tree which again could produce thousands of apples. Why then the world wasn’t filled with apple trees?

It is a rule of nature that only a few of these seeds grow. Most never do or are destroyed early on in their growth.

And it came to my mind it’s quite often so with people’s dreams also. Wonderful ideas come to our minds but they die too soon—we don’t tend to the little saplings , we don’t protect them as we should. And then one day we wonder what happened to our dreams—why did they never come true?

I put the apple seed on the table, and bent down to see how the light was reflected from it, this nature’s tiny wonder. I wondered when someone was seriously growing apples, how many times they had to try to get a seed to germinate ? How much work did it require?

Maybe it was like with our dreams: the seeds of your dreams did not automatically grow. Planting an apple tree, it might take many tries. You might meet dozens of people until you met the true friend.

But if you kept on sowing the seeds of your dream, one day you would succeed. And after that others would comment you were lucky to be successful—when in fact you probably failed more often than you would like to count. But you were good at failing—you learned, you adapted, and then with your new knowledge you tried again. And again. And again. And one day success was yours.

I picked up the apple seed again—but instead of throwing it away I took an empty flower pot, poured some earth into it and planted the seed. Maybe one day it would grow into a proud tree. I’d never know if I didn’t try.