Page 47 - Benjamin Franklin\'s The Way to Wealth: A 52 brilliant ideas interpretation - PDFDrive.com
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19 EATING THE ELEPHANT
Don’t be daunted by big tasks—instead break them down to a
manageable size. As the man said, ‘’Tis true there is much to be done,
and perhaps you are weak handed, but stick to it steadily, and you will
see great effects…’
In South Africa there’s a saying which goes ‘How do you eat an elephant?’
to which the answer is ‘One spoonful at a time.’ This simply means that
any apparently daunting task can be dealt with effectively by breaking it
down into much smaller components and tackling those one at a time.
DEFINING IDEA…
Time management is life management.
~ ROBIN SHARMA, AUTHOR OF THE MONK WHO SOLD HIS FERRARI
Franklin, as far as I am aware, didn’t go in for elephant analogies.
However, he did drum home the elephant/spoon issue not once but
repeatedly and chose a number of other analogies to make his point: ‘…for
constant dripping wears away stones, and by diligence and patience the
mouse ate in two the cable; and little strokes fell great oaks.’
Of course, in day-to-day life you may not choose to see yourself as a
cable-chewing rodent, let alone a drip, but the essential idea is this: don’t
be daunted by the size of a task. Instead break it down, identify what you
can do, what you can’t do, what help you need and where your own
personal efforts will have the most effect in getting the job done.
A friend of mine works as a trouble-shooting consultant for global media
projects that are starting to look as though they are going decidedly fruit
shaped. Time and time again, she tells me, the real cause of the problem is
not individual incompetence but rather a form of group hysteria. The sheer
vastness of the job at hand leaves the people involved feeling impotent and
squandering precious time as the inevitable deadline approaches.
Her first step is to call everyone to heel and break the job down into:
