The Baby Elephant Syndrome

cute baby elephant syndrome

Hi, here's a quick one.

I need to start doing my assignments and catching up to my studies. I just hate it when I spent too much time on having dinner with my guys. No offence, but it's kinda waste of time sometimes. 2 hours for dinner every night, sigh...there are truckloads of works to do..

Anyway, have u guys heard about "baby elephant syndrome"? My Electronics 2 lecturer, Dr. Marinah brought it up this morning in her lecture. Quite a good thing to share :) So, have u guys heard about it?

No? lemme explain.

Imagine a circus, the usual fun fare we have around. In there, lived a baby elephant. This baby elephant has been living in captivity since it was born. During the captivity, it is tied to a small tree with a thin rope every night. Due to its nature to roam free, instinctively the baby elephant tried with all its might to break the rope but it wasn't strong enough at the time to do so. For years it tried and tried until at some point, it realized its efforts are of no use and it finally gave up and stopped struggling. After that point, the baby elephant never tried again for the rest of its life.

Years later when it grew bigger, it was still tied to the same small tree with the same thin rope. It could easily free itself by uprooting the tree or breaking the rope but because its mind has been fully conditioned by its prior experiences, it never made the slightest attempt.

Poorly, the powerful gigantic elephant has limited its own present abilities based on its thought on its limitation of the past - the Baby Elephant Syndrome.

yes yes yes

We, as human can be exposed to the same condition except for one thing - we could choose to re-discover our own abilities and believe in ourself and break free from our thoughts on the limitation of the past. Be honest to yourself, when we put our mind into it, there are many things we might have wished to do in the past but at that time, we were limited by external factors of some kind. We stumble into things in daily life and for a few seconds, we wanted to do something. Seconds later, comes the thought "...I can't do this because in the past.." - you realize you have been in the similar situation in the past. That's it.

Now that you have heard about the Baby Elephant Syndrome, take some time to find out your list of reasons why you are not having or doing what you want.

Are any of them merely excuses rather than legitimate reasons?
Is any of them just an elephant rope holding you back?

P/S : It's an analogy used by Dr. Marinah to persuade us to realize that Electronics subject wasn't that difficult. That's true. It is not naturally difficult, you see. But, when we don't study...