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The Story Of The Baby Elephant
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The Story Of The Baby Elephant

Wilko van de Kamp's avatar
Wilko van de Kamp
Dec 19, 2019
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Living by Experience
Living by Experience
The Story Of The Baby Elephant
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Have you ever felt stuck in your life? Maybe you have been faced with a problem over and over again, and you can’t seem to overcome it? Maybe that same problem resurfaced at different times in your life? This isn’t another article singing the praises of positive thinking (I promise), but if the above sounds vaguely familiar at all, consider the story of the baby elephant:

A baby elephant is trained at birth to be confined to a very small space. Its trainer will tie its leg with a rope to a wooden post planted deep in the ground. This confines the baby elephant to an area determined by the length of the rope—the elephant’s comfort zone. Though the baby elephant will initially try to break the rope, the rope is too strong, and so the baby elephant learns that it can’t break the rope. It learns that it has to stay in the area defined by the length of the rope.

When the elephant grows up into a 5-ton colossus that could easily break the same rope, it doesn’t even try because it learned as a…

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