I was reading a book called The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler. The books talks about what it takes to create a remarkable career in software development. It is a very good read and if you haven’t read it yet I suggest you check it out. In this post I will try to one particular story that resonated with me.
In one of the chapter, the author tells a famous story about catching monkeys in south India. The story originally appeared in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. It does not really matter whether the story is true but what is important here is what it signifies.
The people of South India, developed a new way to trap monkey as they are pestering people and causing trouble. They dig a long narrow hole in the ground and then use an equally long cylinder to widen the bottom of the hole and the bottom of the hoe is filled with rice.
Monkeys love to eat and as such they would come along, discover the rice and stretch their arms deep into the hole to get to the rice. They try to collect as much rice as possible and in the process they make a fist. Their fists fit in the wide part of the hole but as they try to pull out it gets stuck in the narrower end of hole.
Of course, the monkey could break free at any time by letting go of the rice but monkeys have a high value of food that they cannot let go. They will keep hold of the food until they die trying to pull it out. The author then explains that the story illustrated a concept called Value Rigidity. Value rigidity happens when you believe in the value of something so strong that you can no longer objectively question it.
In the story, the monkeys valued the food so high that when faced with the choice between food and captivity they could not understand that losing the food was the right thing at the time. The monkey is trapped but not by anything physical but rather an idea.
This made me thing about the monkey traps in my life. It is easy to develop value rigidity in our choices; we know what has worked and we keep doing it. Many times we hold on to our assumptions that they become blinding and we are unable to see that things are changing.
Hope this short story inspires you.