CuppaGemma

Aesop’s fables should be included in grown up reading lists, right alongside the management books. Part of being successful in a business is being able to understand exactly what your product is and why a consumer, reader, or user should care about it.

If you don’t know that to begin with, then really all you have a patchwork of other people’s ideas held together by something you hope is not a thread called “me too”.

You see that in retail and restaurants, copy cat syndrome- if you do what everyone else is doing you can be just as popular, respected or profitable as them.

Therein lies the problem. You want to be them, not yourself.

There is a lack of faith in your ability to know yourself and be yourself. Maybe it’s not enough, so you kinda sorta wanna be like Mike. Jordan, not Bloomberg. Though hey, maybe both.

And this can lead to a constant rejiggering of what you do, how you look and leave the folks who might have been engaged scratching their heads as they continue down that street.

The fable about the miller, his son and their donkey captures this idea well.

They are driving the donkey down to market. As the fable progresses different passers by note, “How silly you are” and gives a different method on how to get there. Let the boy sit, let the man sit, let the boy and the man sit, no just carry the damn ass on a pole and get there.

They are all hot and tired from trying so many ways, and the poor donkey is quite frightened. So he reacts.

Now the miller and his son never thought the donkey might have a mind of its own, or the strength to wiggle and struggle. The ropes break and the men never see the donkey again. Whether he swam or drowned is a matter of interpretation.

But the men, who cannot make or hold to their own decision now have nothing to hold onto.

It’s an idea we see in Emerson too, “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Being yourself is not silly. After all that is who you will wake up with every morning and who helps you put on and take off  masks and facades, if you choose- like blue eyeshadow- to apply them.