Good stuff for underconfident days

Something a little different today. Two little stories. Great for those days when you feel like you’ve kinda not got the right stuff to be successful. Ever have those days? Oh yes. Me too.

The Church Janitor.

Somerset Maugham, the English writer, wrote a story about a janitor at St Peter’s Church in London. Here’s how it goes:

One day a young vicar discovered that his Church janitor was illiterate so he fired him (as they did on those days!). The man couldn’t get another job so he invested his meagre savings into a tiny tobacco shop. The tiny shop went really well so he bought another. And another. And another. Eventually he ended up with a large and thriving chain of tobacco stores worth several hundred thousand pounds (lots in those days!).

One day the man’s banker said, “You’ve done well for an illiterate, but where would you be if you could read and write?” “Well,” replied the man, “I’d be janitor of St. Peter’s Church in Neville Square.”

The eagle and the chicken.

A chicken farmer found an eagle’s egg. It’s mother wasn’t around so he put the egg with his chickens and soon the egg hatched.

The young eagle grew up with all the other chickens and whatever they did, the eagle did too. He thought he was a chicken, just like them.

Since the chickens could only fly for a short distance, the eagle also learnt to fly a short distance.

He thought that was what he was supposed to do. So that was all that he thought he could do. As a consequence, that was all he was able to do.

One day the eagle saw a bird flying high above him. He was very impressed. “Who is that?” he asked the hens around him.

“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” the hens told him. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth, we are just chickens.”

So the eagle lived and died as a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.

 

Feeling better now?!

 

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