Not to brag, but this summer I grew fourteen gorgeous heirloom tomatoes from a single plant. The tomatoes were so tasty and sweet, I (briefly) considered ditching chocolate for my daily dessert.

In early August, as I snipped the last tomato from the vine, I noticed many of leaves looked dry, a dark purple creeping around the edges. Spots dotted the trunk and branches. I was sure the plant was a goner, a pessimism echoed by gardeners who tole me it was time to chop the plant down and look forward to next year.

But I’d grown to love this plant and I wasn’t ready to take the loppers to it. I procrastinated. By the time I’d mustered up the courage, to my surprise, I found a small tomato growing like a small, green pearl of hope.

A month has now passed since that discovery. Despite me pruning like crazy and adding kelp and other exotic fertilizers, the plant itself still appears to be struggling. But it also has ten tomatoes at various stages of maturity, and clusters of flowers that promise more.

Now, I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I still may not get to eat any of these. Let’s just say it’s a good thing chocolate is still fully stocked at the grocery store.

But part of what entrances me about gardening is the ability to visualize resiliency as it’s happening. Like the plant that had to regrow every leaf after caterpillars took it down to sticks and stems. Or the time a woman in my gardening group duct taped the snapped crown of a zucchini plant that went on to produce the rest of the summer.

But not every situation is recoverable, is it?

It made me reflect that sometimes we are the gardener of our lives, wondering if everything will be okay with a little duct tape or we just need to rip everything up and start over. And sometimes we are the tomato, trying to make sense of our ugly leaves on the one hand and our ability to bear fruit no one expected on the other. Are we healthy or unhealthy? A failure or a success?

It can be hard to know, especially when we’re talking your life/job/relationship and the stakes feel high. That’s why I like looking at failure through a different lens. You can see the insights more clearly when you aren’t so attached to the outcomes.

Here are three things my beloved tomato has taught me about diagnosing performance and our chances of success:
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1. Change (or eliminate) perspectives

One morning, with the sun shining directly on my tomato, I couldn’t help but notice how much greener and healthier it looked. That same afternoon, once the light had changed? “Oh no,” I thought, “you’re not healthy at all.” Two very different conclusions, even though nothing had changed about the plant itself.

You’ve probably noticed the same thing when you compare your thinking about a problem before and after a good night’s sleep. Or when you ask two people the same question and get conflicting opinions.

When this happens it means both perspectives are suspect—you might consider discarding both or looking for additional evidence that supports one conclusion over the other. Just be aware of our bias to selectively look for evidence that supports our preferred conclusion, whether optimistic or pessimistic.

In my case, I reasoned that the hardest thing a tomato has to do is set and grow fruit. If it’s doing that successfully, it’s probably in decent health. Likewise, if you’re succeeding at the hard parts (or the most important parts) of your life/problem, things are probably going better than you think.
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2. Look harder

Small successes are easy to overlook. By the time I found my first tomato, it had already been growing for a week. As new leaves emerged, they looked good compared to the old leaves, but the old leaves were far more abundant and therefore colored my perspective.

Things don’t usually turn around overnight. Especially as you take actions to improve your situation, don’t discount early successes—small improvements might indicate much bigger changes over time.

Another place you might want to take a closer look is who or what you’re comparing yourself too. When I coached overachievers, I noticed how they often compared themselves to the best in class. As Roosevelt said, comparison can be the thief of joy.

In my case, I remind myself that, as a new gardener, I’ve already produced fourteen tomatoes this season—whatever happens here, it’s not a failure.

3. Lean into learning

You’ve probably heard the saying “Failure is a better teacher than success,” but the truth is more complicated. Research from the University of Chicago found people more often focused on the negative emotions of failure rather than the potential for a teachable moment. My experience has been that learning from failure is an active, not a passive, process.

In this case, I’ve decided to start keeping a gardening journal, so I know when I made certain interventions, what the result was, and how long it took to see those results. I’m also archiving photos of problems, so I’ll recognize them when I see them again. Finally, I’m trying to help people with similar problems in my gardening group to see if my lessons learned are widely applicable or maybe the wrong conclusion.

Baring catastrophe, it’s good to remind yourself that life is a tomato. I mean, an experiment. And when it comes to experiments, there really is no such a thing as success or failure, just good or bad data and conclusions.

Or maybe life is a tomato—juicy, unexpectedly sweet, and beautiful in its variety. In that case, why are we thinking about failure at all?

Let us instead celebrate our own growth, the miracle that something so magnificent exists at all.