One day a farmer was sitting under a shelter in his field. While staring at his crops he thought pensively about how year after year he never made an improvement with his harvest. This upset him since in his mind he had worked very hard.
The farmer began talking to himself and said: "For years I have cultivated my rice fields, tirelessly working on them with diligence and affection. But after all this time and after all of this hard work, my fields still only yield little improvement. Oh, what an unjust world this is”!
After a while, the farmer got up from his resting place and walked deeper into his fields. As he walked the sparrows that come to eat his rice started to scatter and fly around him. Year after year the farmer battled to fight off the birds that were eating away at his produce. The age-old scarecrow that worked at scaring off the birds at first had lost its presence of danger and now the birds continued to feast on his field despite the efforts of the straw man.
The farmer however was persistent that the scarecrow was a solution since it had always worked before. He moved it around again and again but to his dismay, the sparrows ignored the fuss, they remained in the fields as if they had no worry in the world. Increasingly, the farmer was exhausted and felt overwhelmed by the onslaught of sparrows.
The farmer then said to himself, "if it continues like this the sparrows will multiply and soon destroy my fields, my efforts are hopeless”. As he said this an elderly man passed by and heard what he said. The man responded with the following words: "Never expect anything big if you never want to make changes to yourself".
The farmer who was staring in the direction of the sparrows was surprised by the voice of the old man as he did not hear him approach. But he politely greeted the man and asked him what he meant. “What changes do you mean?” he asked, “I've done my job right”. The farmer was somewhat offended and taken aback by the stranger’s words.
"Changes in the way you take care of your fields”, replied the old man, “what worked once will not always work, times and practices change. Keeping things the way they are is easy, making a change requires maximum effort and innovative thinking. If you keep working this your crops will diminish each year, it’s time for change”.
With curiosity, the farmer asked, “then what shall I do”?
“You need to study, you need to constantly learn and improve on your methods”, replied the elderly stranger. "You need to take age-old methods of farming and improve them with your own innovation. Leave the scarecrow and discover something that will work for you.” At this point, the old man bowed his head in greeting and continued with his journey, leaving the farmer quire in thought.
Under his breathe the farmer whispered to himself “I’ll try”.
The wisdom that can be taken from the story above is:
To reap big rewards, one needs to go beyond the basic efforts and tasks. We need to use our knowledge to think of solutions that will work for us since a method does not yield the same results for everyone.
team.