Not every bud blossoms. And that’s okay.

Something I’ve been musing on lately:

A flower is not inevitable. It begins as potential—the kind that lives quietly in stems. Each stem offers a bud. Each bud, a question. Will this be the one?

Most don’t make it. They try. They stretch. They form. But not all bloom.

Some falter in silence. Some wait too long. Some simply never catch the right moment, the right light.

And yet — the plant goes on. It keeps sending up stems. Keeps making buds. Keeps trying. Because the act of blooming is never guaranteed. It’s part timing, part effort, and part something unknowable.

But if you’re persistent—if you keep showing up—there may come a morning when the sun lands just right. And in that light, without fanfare or noise, you realize: you’ve bloomed.

Not every bud blooms into a flower. And that’s OK.

This musing strikes a nerve within me, as it is parallel to the world I live in and the life I have chosen.

In the world of startups, strategy, and even personal growth, we’re taught to optimize, iterate, cut losses fast. But what we rarely admit out loud is this: you don’t always know which stem will produce a bud that will bloom until the very end.

Over the years, I’ve started things that didn’t go anywhere. Built products that never scaled. Chased opportunities that felt like “the one,” only to fizzle out. At the time, it was frustrating. It felt like failure.

Looking back, growing those stems and buds was necessary. Many didn’t bloom, but they strengthened the plant, gave me reach, and taught me how to adapt, prune, and grow with more intention. Every non-blooming bud shaped the conditions for that one flower to catch the sun just right.

We tend to celebrate the moment the flower opens: IPO day, product launch, funding announcement, bestselling book, whatever the metric is. But we don’t talk enough about the unseen buds: the drafts that didn’t work, the pivots that felt like regressions, the “almosts.”

Being curious, staying open to trying, learning, wandering—is how the plant keeps branching out. It’s how we discover what we’re really made for. And it’s the reason I keep showing up here, writing, exploring, building things that might work—or might not.

If you feel like one of your hard-forged buds isn’t blooming right now, don’t give up on the stem that produced it nor the entire plant.

The sunlight you need to get there might just be one stretch away.