JOIN USAlbert Einstein once said, “In all my life I have used only 25 per cent of the god-given ability I possess.”
Such a line from the world’s most celebrated physicist, who discovered the concept of ‘relativity,’ brings out the truth that man uses only a small per cent of his intellect at any given time.
While a major part of our cognitive reserves lie untouched and unused, we live a life of quiet desperation, never raising to our full potential and blaming an uncaring world for our deficiencies.
A failure to use one’s talents – the apparent and the hidden – signifies irresponsibility and foolhardiness. It is synonymous with leaving a valuable gift locked up idle in the attic.
What is worse, the unused gift rots, loses its lustre and eventually becomes worthless. So it is, with all our god-given endowments. They are either totally unused or grossly underused, leading to a colossal depreciation of these endowments over time.
Among the many reasons that lead to this phenomenon of underutilisation of talents is the preconceived notion that one is never good enough to stretch beyond known territories.
A tale about an eaglet which ended up being a chicken all its life throws much light on this malady. A farmer once found an eagle’s egg and put it into the nest of a prairie chicken. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.
All its life, the changeling eagle, thinking it was a prairie chicken, did what the prairie chickens did.
It scratched in the dirt for seeds and insects to eat. It clucked and cackled. And it flew in a brief thrashing of wings and flurry of feathers no more than a few feet off the ground. After all that is how prairie chickens were supposed to fly.
Years passed and the changeling eagle grew very old. One day, it saw a magnificent bird far above in the cloudless sky. Hanging with graceful majesty on the powerful wind currents, it soared mightily with its strong golden wings.
“What a beautiful bird,” said the changeling eagle to its neighbour. “What is it?” “That’s an eagle, the chief of the birds,” the neighbour clucked. “But don’t give it a second thought. You could never be like him.”
So, the changeling eagle never gave it another thought. And it died thinking it was a prairie chicken.
A comparable analogy could be drawn concerning people.
Thinking ourselves to be incapable of many feats we live a life of self-fulfilling prophesies of failures. Rising above prejudices and mind-blocks will open a whole new set of possibilities from where one can spread his wings, fly high and reach for the stars.