Archive for March 22nd, 2007
Jumping to Startup – The Monkey Way!
A friend of mine sent me an email with this interesting story:
Once there was a monkey who came near a residential house while wandering outside the jungle. He saw a bowl of beautiful apples in that house. He took one in each hand and ran back into the forest.
He sniffed the apples and smelled nothing. He tried to eat them, but it hurt his teeth. He realized that they were made of wood, but he found them beautiful.
He liked his new possessions as they kept glistening red in the sun. He became so attached to them that he started forgetting his hunger for real apples. Soon he became very weak due to lack of food.
He started finding those wooden apples heavier as he tried to carry them along with him. He was very hungry and wanted to eat some real apples. But he couldn’t climb on trees because he was weak and he couldn’t collect fruits because his hands were full of wooden apples. The poor little monkey thought about leaving those wooden apples behind.
But letting such valuable things go of seemed crazy to him. But what else he could do? Finally, seeing the next fruit tree, he dropped those wooden apples and reached up for his meal. He was happy and healthy again.
Some take away from this story:
- Like that little monkey, we sometimes carry “materialistic” things that seem to us very valuable and we find it difficult to let them go away.
- When we work for big corporations, we often get such “shiny but wooden apples” which are actually no use of ours.
- It is very usual to get trapped into the “comfort zone” of these companies. And it is equally tough to break that trap and go for our passion.
- For young professionals like me, who are carrying entrepreneurial passion, it seems very risky to leave these high salaried and secure jobs.
- I guess it is not that we fear about our capabilities. It is more about our fear to leave the comfort zone of big corporations.
- We need to understand that the real apple lies in our passion. The rest is just show off and materialistic world.
- We need to keep searching for that “real fruit” tree, and once we find that, we need to leave behind our so called “valuable” things for our passion.
- Before we become too weak and too late to climb on that tree, we need to take some action and jump for our passion.
Happy searching the "real fruit" tree!
