One day a man found an eagle’s egg and put it in the nest of a farmyard turkey, along with the rest of the eggs. The eagle hatched surrounded by turkeys, was raised by turkeys and so did the same as the turkeys did. It grew up thinking it was a turkey, feeding on worms and insects.
As time went by, it would look up at the sky and see a few sparrows flying. It felt envious, because turkeys can’t fly. It dreamed of flying, even though it knew it never could.
One afternoon it saw a great bird gliding across the sky in masterful flight. It was an eagle with huge wings.
The farmyard eagle looked on in amazement and asked its fellow turkeys: “Who is that flying up there?“
One of the turkeys replied: “That’s an eagle, the king of the birds. It belongs to the sky, while we are turkeys and we belong to the ground.”
The eagle grew old and eventually died as what it knew itself to be: a turkey.
The moral of the story.
There are many more turkeys than eagles in your town, in your city and in any company. You were probably even born and raised surrounded by turkeys. But many of these people are eagles who have spent so long surrounded by turkeys that they believe they are just one more bird in the farmyard.
They look at the great successes of the eagles, but they think: they are eagles, while we are turkeys.
We are born conditioned by society’s beliefs, by values and ideas that we assume are what we are entitled to, given our turkey status. We limit our way of thinking and acting, sometimes by telling ourselves we aren’t good enough at something, or not smart enough, to be an eagle instead of a turkey.
What if we are all really born eagles, but find it more comfortable to live like turkeys?
See also: 9 truths about life and business, by Geoffrey James
Further reading
- The story of the fisherman and the businessman
- The parable of success: the gold prospector
- 6 business morals drawn from 6 funny stories
Featured image: David Goehring, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
