What You Can Learn From Fleas

Your experience influences how high you think you can go. If you have been told (or told yourself) that you can only expect so much out of life, you may have conditioned yourself to mediocrity.

One of my favorite stories is about flea training. It is the perfect illustration of how your experience can limit what you are able to accomplish. If you put a bunch of fleas in a jar and put a lid on the jar, the fleas will jump up and collide with the jar lid. They quickly adjust how high they jump so they won’t hit the lid. After they adjust their jumping power to avoid the lid, you can take the lid off of the jar and the fleas will not jump out! They will have trained themselves to jump so high and no higher. The fleas actually become slaves to their experience and imprison themselves inside the jar—even though they could jump out at any time after the lid is removed.

People do the same thing to themselves. Somewhere in most people’s experience, they develop the idea that they can (or should) do only so much and no more. They adjust their expectations of themselves accordingly, and they get what they expect: less than what they are capable of!

I believe you have the potential to do and accomplish far more than you believe you are capable of doing and accomplishing! I believe that because history is filled with stories of men and women who have done just that. If you study the lives of great people, you usually discover they came from average families, living average lives, doing very average things. Then, these people have some kind of experience or encounter a turning point that puts them in position to do more than they could even conceive. Or possibly they became sick and tired of living the way they were living and finally said, “Enough is enough!” In every instance they responded to the experience or opportunity and accepted the challenge to grow.

Former United States President Dwight Eisenhower was not a high-ranking officer in the years prior to World War II, but he was passionate about wanting to get out from behind a desk and fight “his war.” He was a staff officer to General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines prior to the war and probably thought continuing in that role would be the best thing he could do. Circumstances of the war and his excellent organizational skills eventually resulted in him becoming the Supreme Commander of all the Allied Armies in Europe, and after the war he was elected president of the United States. Eisenhower is actually quoted as saying, “I thought it completely absurd to mention my name in the same breath as the presidency.”

The amazing and even startling point of this story is that there was never one big thing Eisenhower did that changed the course of his life. Every small step, every small promotion, every new direction his military life took led to a culmination of events that resulted in his huge lifetime of success. His willingness to accept every new position, regardless of how mundane or challenging it might be, moved Dwight Eisenhower toward his destiny.

What about you? What do you expect of yourself? What is your turning point? You can do more than you think you can do. But you’ll never know if you don’t try. Go out there and see all the good things life has to offer a flea trainer.