Tuesday, March 06, 2012

The biggest wrong lesson that you learnt in your 1ST standard

I dont think there exists anyone on this earth who has done his first standard and doesn't know about the famous story of animalkind wherein a race was set between a fast and furious rabbit and a slow and steady tortoise. Neither me nor you know where the race was set? who set up the race between these 2 animals? for how long the race happened? but still each one of us have been taught either by our teachers or elders the moral of this race story as "SLOW AND STEADY WINS THE RACE" at one point or the other in our lives.

As soon as the race began, the rabbit sped miles ahead of the tortoise who was struggling hard to run carrying his heavy shell on his back. As rabbit saw that the tortoise was way behind him, he thought of taking a power nap before reaching the finishing line. The tortoise kept putting its efforts, surpassed the sleeping rabbit and reached the finishing red ribbon and won the race.

Folks! Only if the rabbit had not slept in between the race there would not have been even 0.000000000001% probability of tortoise winning the race by running faster than the rabbit. Was the rabbit foolish enough to sleep during a race? I am not sure about the answer but if the rabbit was really serious about winning the race it would not even have paused to take a deep breath. Logically a tortoise can never run as fast as a rabbit or even think of beating it in a running race. We all know this.

The biggest mistake made here was putting the strength of one animal against the weakness of the another animal in a challenge. Had the case been a race between 2 rabbits or between 2 turtles the moral would never have been 'slow and steady wins the race'. Inturn it would have been 'fast and furious wins the race'. Likewise friends beware! Most of us make the mistake of comparing our weaknesses with someone else's strengths and feel inferior or the other way ie, we start comparing our strengths with someone else's  weaknesses  and feel superior.

As my birthday-mate(Albert Einstein) rightly said "If you expected a fish to climb a tree, it would think of itself as a failure all its life", lets not make the same mistake and learn the wrong lesson which we did in our first standard. Rather lets get back on track to weaken our weaknesses and strengthen our strengths.

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1 comment:

  1. I seriously couldn't have looked at this story from this angle. Wow! So true. "If you expected a fish to climb a tree, it would think of itself as a failure all its life" has been one of my favorite quotations of all time. Good one :-)

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