The Animals’ School – By George Reavis

A Story About Recognizing Your Strengths

Once upon a time, the animals decided that they should do something meaningful to meet the problems of the new world, so they organized a school.

They adopted an activity curriculum of running, climbing, swimming and flying.  To make it easier to administer, all of the animals took all of the subjects.

The duck was excellent at swimming.  In fact, he was better than his instructor.  However, he made only passing marks in flying and was very poor at running.  Since he was so slow in running, he had to drop his swimming class and do extra running.  This caused his webbed feet to become badly worn, meaning that he dropped to an average mark in swimming.  Fortunately, “average” was acceptable, therefore nobody worried about it – except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of the class in running, but developed a nervous twitch in his leg muscles because he had so much makeup work to do in swimming.

The Will To Fail

I was reading a Norman Vincent Peale book when I happened upon the phrase/concept "The Will To Fail".  The following was retrieved from http://18mind.com/mind/wake_up_and_live_the_will_to_fail on 7/20/13 ... the video of the 1961 Katie Lee song was retrieved the same date on youtube and in about two and a half minutes, with humor, portrays and explains what the concept may look like in action ...

The Will to Fail

December 28, 2008 by gus

FROM the disciples of Schopenhauer and Freud, of Nietzche and Adler, we have all become conversant with such phrases as the Will to Live and the Will to Power. These phrases, representing---sometimes to the verge of overstatement---drives of the organism towards fulfillment and growth, correspond to truths of experience with which each of us is familiar. We have seen children struggle to make themselves and their personalities felt; as young people we have contended for a chance to try our own emerging forces; after long illness we have felt the tide of returning strength in our veins. We know that any average man caught in unfortunate circumstances will put up with poverty, distress, humiliation with conditions which an onlooker will sometimes consider as much worse than death; and that only the presence of a will to continue living can account for the tenacity with which a man in such circumstances clings to the mere right to breathe and exist.

Furthermore, we first experience and then later turn to realize the process of growth in ourselves. The individual, emerges from childhood into adolescence, from adolescence into maturity; and at each of these crisis we find that the activities and interests of the old period are being replaced by those of the new, that Nature is preparing the organism for its new role in the world, is actually reconciling us to the new demands on us by showing us pleasures and rewards in the oncoming state which will replace those we must abandon.