One day a man saw a butterfly shuddering on the sidewalk, locked in a seemingly hopeless struggle to free itself from it’s now useless cocoon.
Feeling pity, he took out his pocket knife, carefully cut away the cocoon and set the butterfly free. To his dismay, it lay on the sidewalk, convulsed weakly for awhile, then died.
A biologist later told the man “That was the worst thing you could have done! A butterfly needs that struggle to develop the muscles to fly. By robbing him of the struggle, you made him too weak to live.”
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I absolutely love this story because there are so many lessons to take from it.
First, as a metaphor it validates and reaffirms that there’s a bigger purpose to the struggles that all of us go through.
What’s that purpose? It’s different for all of us but it often involves transformation, growth, or improvement. (Even those struggles we bring upon ourselves that are caused by our own poor actions, mistakes, or negligence!)
Whether it’s our business, health, a relationship, or something else…just like that butterfly, we have to remember that through persistence and effort, we will emerge from the challenge on the other side and will eventually be able to look back with a different perspective and appreciation for the struggle.
Sure it will be uncomfortable while you’re in the moment and going through it. Yes it might even really suck really bad. But it’s worth it and you have to keep pressing on, even when the end isn’t immediately in sight.
Think about what would happen if the caterpillar decided “Naw…I think I’d rather stay with what I know and what I’m comfortable with…crawling around on my belly really isn’t that bad.”
It would never experience the joy of flying and fulfilling what it was meant for and there would be no butterflies! That would be horrible right?
We’re the same way! We need to recognize and appreciate the struggle and realize that there’s always a purpose and cause behind it.
Another important lesson from that story is that we can only truly move forward and grow after we have struggled through and conquered a challenge on our own.
No one else can go through it for us. A tangent to this is that sometimes allowing others to struggle (to some extent – let’s be reasonable here) is actually good for them.
The irony is that if you solve all their problems they’ll be weaker for it in the long run – you haven’t helped them at all. You’ve robbed them of the self-confidence and discipline they would have developed had they overcome it themselves. Us “fix it” type guys can really struggle with this because we want to jump right in and help.
This principle was revealed to me a while ago when my daughter was younger. She had never been ice skating before and we were walking by an outdoor ice rink on our way to a museum in Washington DC. She wanted to try it, so my girlfriend at the time and I each took an arm and stood by her side, diligently trying to support her and protect her from falling or even getting off balance in the least.
Did it work? No! She did horribly! She was falling all over the place and her legs were flailing everywhere! She almost made all of us crash and bite it! My astute observational skills (sarcasm) made me realize that despite our best intentions, our assistance wasn’t helping her at all and that it was probably hurting her more than anything.
We then decided to let her skate on her own, with us just staying close by, more for moral support and encouragement. Even though her “skating” was really a series of short awkward frantic steps on the ice, she did 10x better than when we were helping her. After I got over the ego bruising that dad didn’t know best, I realized we were hurting her by helping too much!
The same can happen in life. We can accidentally enable people and end up hurting them more than we’re helping. Look out for this in your own life – both with people helping you and you helping others.
Who knew so much could be learned from a butterfly!?
Tags: helping others / overcoming challenge / understanding purpose