“Ensure that you are getting truly useful rewards as part of the work that you are doing.”

There are many different types of yield that can be collected from the fruits of our efforts.

Whether it’s turning last year’s composted kitchen scraps into this year’s garden beds, enjoying your youth and the health of your family while you have it, or choosing to plant fruit trees instead of ornamentals at the office, it’s important to design systems around you to best leverage your efforts.

Businesses naturally think about this principle when planning their investments and assessing cash flow.

Don’t Get it Wrong

However, when practices are used that are exploitative, distorting, and see profit as the sole focus, obtaining a yield in this context is out of balance.

Beyond money, other types of value can be created as well. Let’s take a look at what those might be.

• Cultivate increasingly beneficial relationships and a more enriching home or workplace, by paying compliments or doing favors. The return on these investments can be life-changing!

• Free up space and create goodwill in your life by turning your trash into other people’s treasures. Contemplate underused resources in your home and explore ways that those resources can be shared with family members, friends, or neighbors.

• Call on a friend for a favor.

• Go for a walk in that nice park in the neighborhood.

• Incentivize your children to do chores around the house or yard.

• Replace your lawns with edible gardens.

• Create edible balcony gardens, as well as common-use areas to have more food than flowers.

• Put plants inside your house to clean the air and provide more oxygen. Create or join a buyers club for your family, neighborhood, co-workers, or employees to take advantage of the savings inherent in increasing your buying power.

• Use those aging veggies, in the fridge, to make a soup before you end up throwing them in the compost.

• Re-invest a portion of your profits/earnings into passive income streams. Re-evaluate your measures of success and perception of value.

This is Part 5 of a 15 part series, pulled from the Permaculture Lifestyles Explained eBook, which contains over 100 tips for how someone might apply the permaculture principles to their life for greater efficiency, impact, and happiness. 

If you’d like to get the whole book to download and read offline, drop your email below and I’ll be happy to send you a link. 

Reclaim your life from uninformed choices and outdated habits!