Wednesday, May 4, 2022

The Barriers and Obstacles Lie Within !!!


One day a wise man from a distant land came to the Court of a Great Emperor of the East and proclaimed that he wanted to challenge the learned men of the kingdom by testing how intelligent they were. The emperor readily agreed and invited some of his courtiers and ministers to face the challenge. The wise man kept a pot covered by a cloth and asked the courtiers and ministers to tell him what it contained. Every one was dumb founded and kept starting silently at each other. There was complete silence. The emperor went blank with anxiety.
Then the kings clever minister came forward, he opened the cloth, looked inside the pot and then said there was nothing in the pot. It was empty indeed

"But you opened it." said the wise man. 

"You did not tell us that it can't be opened" shot back the clever minister.

The wise man was cornered. He quietly left.
Learning: There are many interesting lessons which come out from this simple story that we can relate to our world of work. While I discuss couple of them here... readers are welcome to add their comments and interpretations.
Often the limitations, boundaries, barriers are all in our minds. We as human beings set the limits and most often those that never existed in the first place.
Very often just because someone thought it so... it became the accepted norm. Common sense might suggest this is not so but we don't stop by to question. Is this familiar in our organizations?
In hind sight the message may seem simple but one needs to break out of the patterned thinking in order to have more creative solutions and approaches to the problems we face.
We also learn that there are others around us who can be more intelligent than we are. Those that outsmart you.... those you never expected to. So it does no harm to accept and acknowledge them for what they bring. When was the last time we acknowledge someone for how they think... of course without pretentions or without being hypocrite like.
I have covered just one dimension of how this story can be interpreted and the message about how the locus of how we respond to any situation is driven from within.
Will be interesting to see other interpretations and dimensions arising from this story.

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