Truth Bomb Tuesday: This is what the sour grapes fable was actually about.
I want to show you something important.
It starts with the story of sour grapes.
We all know that one. The Fox can’t reach the grapes he wants and so tells himself that those grapes were probably sour anyway.
Now the thing to remember about Aesop’s fables is that we’re not talking about some things that some people do, but things that we all do. Aesop is identifying fundamental human tendencies, and we should see them not as examples of flaws that some people carry, but flaws that we all carry.
Now, what’s actually happening in that moment of sour grapes? Well, at the most basic level, the Fox is diffusing the discomfort that comes when you can’t get what you want.
That’s what the fox is trying to do. And when he convinces himself that the grapes were sour anyway, then he no longer feels the discomfort of being separated from his desires.
But the sour grapes strategy is only one of many strategies for achieving this aim.
Sometimes we flip the script and tell ourselves that we didn’t actually want it that much anyway.
Sometimes we tell ourselves that we don’t really deserve that kind of success. That success like that belongs only to a few very special and very virtuous people. It was never meant for people like us.
Or we tell ourselves the success requires us to make compromises we’re just not willing to make. That we have to be selfish or greedy or callous.
“I don’t want to be wealthy, because wealthy people are greedy and selfish.”
Do you see what I mean? There are 1 million ways to skin this cat.
But the fundamental desire here is to diffuse the discomfort that comes with not having what we want.
But we don’t want to do this.
Why? There’s two reasons.
The first is we don’t want to do anything that undermines the validity of our desires.
What you want is what you want. It’s okay to want what you want.
You should be very guarded against any voice that wants to tell you that your desires are too selfish or too greedy or too dreamy or anything other than perfectly what they are.
The other reason is that discomfort is an energy. It’s a powerful motivating force. Put your hand on an open flame and you become very focused and very motivated to move your hand.
When there is discomfort in your life, you become very motivated and doing what you have to do to eliminate that discomfort.
In that sense, the sour grapes strategy or any of the other defusing strategies are the cheap and easy way out.
What we have to do is to find the discipline and the strength to be able to be with our discomfort, and to let that discomfort transform itself into drive and motivation.
But very few of us can do that. Most of us will take the easy way out.
And that is what Aesop was trying to show us.
DB.