This one is in continuation with ankur’s post on elephants…
A bunch of hungry monkeys were put in a room with a single banana attached to the ceiling and one table underneath.
Every time a monkey tried to climb up the table to reach the banana, the other monkeys slapped it and didn’t let it get to it. They all wanted the banana for themselves, so none ended up reaching it. Soon all the monkeys had given up trying.
Thereafter, half of the group were replaced by new monkeys. The new monkeys tried getting up but the older ones slapped them down. Soon enough, they too stopped trying.
Now…
the other half of the original monkeys were also replaced by a new lot and additionally, adequate amount of bananas were attached to the ceiling.
No prizes for guessing – the same routine continued as before. This despite the fact that there were none of the original monkeys and there was plenty of bananas.
Force of habit…
July 26, 2009
The elephants…now monkeys
Mindset
Borrowed it from an email forward:
As I was passing the elephants, I suddenly stopped, confused by the fact that these huge creatures were being held by only a small rope tied to their front leg. No chains, no cages. It was obvious that the elephants could, at anytime, break away from the ropes they were tied to but for some reason, they did not.
I saw a trainer near by and asked why these beautiful, magnificent animals just stood there and made no attempt to get away.
“Well,” he said, “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.”
I was amazed. These animals could at any time break free from their bonds but because they believed they couldn’t, they were stuck right where they were.
Like the elephants, how many of us go through life hanging onto a belief that we cannot do something, simply because we failed at it once before?
Ankur Aggarwal
sree
Sandip Chaudhuri
vbr
shobhendrasrivastava
