Animal Lessons

Mark Twain famously wrote in his book Pudd'nhead Wilson,“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”

Here’s another difference:

My Golden Retriever Becca is 11 years old and she still chases Gekko’s in our yard in Phoenix. You know what a Gekko looks like if you’ve seen those Geico commercials on television.

My house is surrounded by a wall and, in the summer, 5 or 10 Gekkos can typically be seen scurrying around the wall. What they are looking for I have no idea (a better deal on car insurance?).

When my dog looks through the sliding glass door into our yard and sees those Gekkos, she invariably starts barking until I open the door and let her out. She immediately runs to the wall and tries to capture the Gekkos in her mouth. She snaps at them but, of course, ends up snapping at empty space because the Gekkos are way too fast for her. However, the next day (or even the same day) when the Gekkos return, my dog is back at the door, barking to be let out. She never gives up even though she hasn’t got a chance of ever catching one. I sometimes think the Gekkos return simply to torment my poor dog.

Now here’s the lesson: Not once has my dog come back into the house, head down, declaring, “I’m such a failure. I try and try and try but I just can’t seem to do anything right. I’m just going to give up.” My dog attaches no meaning to “failure.” She will never fail. She simply hasn’t yet succeeded.

For human beings, however, failure has a lot of meaning. We don’t simply fail to catch our “Gekko.” We are failures. We fear failure and, after awhile, give up.

The “formula” for success is to keep our eyes on the goal and not be attached to how we get there. Failure simply means we didn’t get the Gekko this time. Perhaps we need a different Gekko capturing strategy (my dog will never grasp this concept). Perhaps we need help from others to capture our Gekko. Perhaps we are looking for our Gekkos in the wrong place.

The key is not to give up on having our Gekko but to give up on the self defeating self talk that stops us from achieving our goals.