A Rabbit, A Squirrel and Your Business?

This is reprinted from the book Inspiration by Wayne Dyer.

The animals got together in the forest one day and decided to start a school.
There was a rabbit, a bird, a squirrel, a fish and an eel, and they formed a board of education.

The rabbit insisted that running be on the curriculum.
The bird insisted that flying be on the curriculum.
The fish insisted that swimming be on the curriculum.
The squirrel insisted that perpendicular tree climbing be on the curriculum.
They put all of these things together and wrote a ‘curriculum guide’.

Then they insisted that all of the students take all of the subjects.
Although the rabbit was getting an ‘ A’  in running, perpendicular tree climbing was a real problem for him; he kept falling over backwards. Pretty soon he got sort of brain damaged, and he couldn’t run anymore. He found that instead of making an A in running, he was now making a C, and of course he always made a F in perpendicular tree climbing.

The bird was really beautiful at flying, but when it came to burrowing in the ground, he couldn’t do so well. He kept breaking his beak and wings. Pretty soon he was making a C in flying as well as an F in burrowing, and he had a helluva time with perpendicular tree climbing.

The moral of this story is that the person who was valedictorian of the class was a mentally retarded eel who did everything in a halfway fashion. But the educators were all happy because everybody was taking all of the subjects, and got a broad-based education.

~Leo Buscaglia

As absurd as this is, we all know that it is frighteningly true!
Clearly this is about schools, and this is not a parenting blog, so I won’t get into the obvious discussion about that here. I will leave that up to the parenting and education bloggers.

I will however take this slightly out of context and shift the focus to how we often do this as adults, both in our personal and professional lives.

Are you making a C in your greatest talents? Are you making a D in your God Given abilities, because you are working so hard on things that aren’t?

I met a woman recently who owns a hair salon. She is a hair stylist and was expressing her frustration with improving her visibility online. Namely, she wants her website to show up on the first page of Google. Since there are actually only a few salons in her town that are on that page, this shouldn’t be too difficult. I explained to her how and why blogs and social networking activity gets much higher ranking and that since she is a ‘people person’ anyway, she would not only find doing these things easier, but actually enjoy them!

Nope! She is absolutely determined to figure ‘this SEO thing out’. No matter what!
Or, she says, she may hire the company who does her competitors site to do hers.

She needs an online presence because she needs business. She needs cash flow!
Regardless of the website, SEO and all of that, the bottom line is she needs people to know that she is there, and there are a lot of ways that she could do that, that she would be good at!

But she is determined to figure it out. Committed to spending who knows how much time and energy trying to understand something many ‘geeks’ can barely game.

As I look forward into the new year, I find myself really taking a hard look at this.
I was a latch-key kid, I’m a ‘do-it-yourselfer’…
and I need to get over it!

If you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten!

I want 2010 to be different. I am committing to collaboration, and to finding people and resources that are awesome at those things that I am not, so that I can focus on sharing the gifts that I have been given!

If I start to slip, remind me of my own quote:
“Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should!”

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