Chinese Fortune Cookie Life Lesson

Upon opening a fortune cookie, I found the following message, "Just because you put tap shoes on an elephant does not mean it can dance."

At first, I thought this was a humorous little message. My very visual mind started to wander, picturing a large elephant wearing these tiny taps shoes and a fifties style skirt and blouse. I pictured this elephant trying do dance but very clumsily. A pretty funny image. So much that I began to laugh out loud to myself. However, I began to in think about the true meaning behind these few words.

In life, we often come across situations that are large clumsy elephants. We are in jobs that we don't enjoy, relationships that we know are destined to fail, situations where we are just out of place. Instead of trying to find a real dancer, we dress up the elephant in its tap shoes, and expect to see a ballet.

There was a time in my life when I was real estate, first in real estate sales and then as a mortgage broker. I quickly discovered that I hated selling homes and houses. I did discover that my natural mathematical abilities seemed to be ideal for the mortgage business, so I changed over to mortgage loan brokering. In California, a mortgage broker has to have passed the state real estate licensing test, so changing over was quick and easy. I felt I was in a field that I was naturally suited to excel in. Oh, how wrong I was. One thing I did discover over and over again is how cut throat the California real estate and mortgage businesses are. Numerous times, I lost customers to other brokers, in spite of the fact that I told them that the other brokers could not offer them anything different than what I could offer. These other brokers would promise that they could get loans at lower interest rates, lower points, or just all around get them a better deal. My potential clients would jump to the other broker only to show up at their closing and find out that the interest rate was higher than they wanted, points were higher, or they had to have much more money than what they felt like they were led to believe that they would need. I would get a phone call, asking what could they do. My response was they could continue and pay the unexpected amount or start all over and still end up paying about the same amount, which was what I had told them in the beginning. And that is what the other broker relied on, that the customer would be backed into a corner with the only options other than forking over the additional dough would be to cancel and maybe start over. I could not bring myself to lower my tactics to this level, so I never really succeeded in mortgage lending. However, I stayed in this field for a long time for one simple reason, the potential money was extremely large. Not that I was making any of that potential money, but since it was in front of me, I was the donkey following the carrot that I would never reach. In other words, I was putting tap shoes on the elephant.

If we all look at our lives, there are times and situations we are putting the tap shoes on the elephant. If we can learn to recognize the dancing elephants in our lives, we can begin to see the situations where we need to stop dressing up the bad and finding the good.

Keep Smiling!!

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