Pruning. Painful. Cutting away. So that new abundance may grow. Pruning is essential in so many spheres of life, not just in agricultural practice. One may prune branches, roots, remove excess foliage, even take away some initial fruit, in order that more fruitfulness may come to pass. Pruning must be conducted circumspectly, not too much and not too little. I once pruned, or thought I was pruning, a bitter gourd plant, believing it had excessive foliage. What I did wrong was remove the growing portion of the plant that would eventually produce more of the bitter gourds I was really after. If you plant chillies, you might want to remove most of the leaves in order to get more chillies. If you have fruit trees, you might need to prune some of the roots in order to stimulate more root hair growth. More root hairs means healthier trees and of course better fruit.

Pruning is counter-intuitive to us. We dislike throwing stuff away, and we are even hesitant about firing people who are not pulling their weight, or who might actually be dampening the efforts of the teams they happen to be part of. Yet it is a vital part of growing and yielding more and better produce.

Another way to think about pruning is when life-or-death issues are involved. Think of a beaver which, when it has a paw caught in a trap, would actually either gnaw it off of try to circle violently in order to break it and set itself free! The beaver loses a paw and suffers terrible pain, but lives to build more dams. The trapper loses a beaver pelt and some profit he might have had from it.

Do you prune regularly? Whether it is pruning yourself, pruning your staff or pruning your business processes? Painful? Get over it! Start today!