“Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you’ll know. It’s the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world.”
Werner Herzog
There is this old story about a chicken desperately trying to reach the food behind a fence. The food is just a little bit too far away for the chicken to reach it. Nevertheless, the chicken tries and tries to reach it, never succeeding, and slowly dying of starvation. It is then revealed that the fence is only a few meters long and the chicken could have easily walked around the fence to reach the food. Yet it never did.
I am no expert on chickens, they usually come deep fried, so I don’t know whether this story is true. But I think it’s a really good analogy how many people get stuck when they are trying to reach a goal. I think one of the hardest things in trying to reach a goal is to voluntarily increase the distance to it in order to reach it. Take the long way, do something else, or move away. It just seems counter-intuitive and unproductive to retreat from a goal. Yet sometimes it’s the best thing you can do.
Unless you want to end up like that chicken.
