Brain Food #779: We are the rope
The elephant story
Thoughts of the day
There is a famous motivational story in coaching circles about the elephant and the rope, which in some ways feels quite relevant to the topic of optionality, procrastination, and risk aversion I wrote about on Monday:
A man went to a circus [or to an elephant camp in India, depending on the version of the story], and noticed that every elephant he saw was tied to a peg with a small rope tied around their leg. The small rope was clearly not enough to hold them back if they ever tried to break it, but they never did. Puzzled, the man asked a trainer about this. The trainer explained: “When they are very young and much smaller we use the same size rope to tie them and, at that age, it’s enough to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They believe the rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free.”
The only reason why the adult elephants don’t break free from the rope is that they think they can’t, based on some self-belief that was instilled in them in their childhood. These are known as limiting beliefs, stemming either from some internal, unjustified feeling of inadequacy, or a pessimistic assessment of our world and our place in it.
Those elephants could also, partly, be afraid of the unknown, and the consequences of leaving their comfort zone.
The more there is at stake, the more one lives with the fear of losing, as if what is supposed to bring security in life brings the exact opposite, a form of paralysis. Perhaps only once we start letting go, giving into the potential of loss, do we realise that the fear is internal, and the worst-case scenario is just an event, like any other.
In some ways, we are the rope. With every option of a future life we add to our portfolio, often to deem ourselves worthy of it (are we entitled to something if we don’t have the background or qualifications for it?), we could be forgetting to go out and explore the life that is already waiting to be explored.
As Bruce Lee wrote in a note to himself:
“You will never get any more out of life than you expect
Keep your mind on the things you want and off those you don’t
Things live by moving and gain strength as they go.”
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