Human Success and the Humming Bird

My wife and I recently went on a camping trip to one of our favorite camp grounds. We love to relax and enjoy the beauty of nature and watch the birds and squirrels and such.

After arriving and setting everything up we were sitting around outside when a humming bird approached one of our wind chimes hanging from our travel trailer canopy. He continued to come back and snoop around the chime as if he were looking for food.

We always bring a few humming bird feeders with us, but this time when had taken them out to use around our back yard and had forgotten to put them back in the camper.

So I decided to improvise. I took a red (because it is widely believed that humming birds are attracted by the color red) 16 ounce Solo brand cup and punched two holes, opposite each other, just under the top edge, and ran a piece of wire through to make a loop to hang the cup. We then filled it with humming bird nectar, until it was literally running over the top and down the sides of the cup, hung it up and waited.

Within five minutes we had our first humming bird coming to check it out. He hovered curiously around the cup near the bottom looking for a place to stick his beak to get the nectar out. In case you aren't familiar with humming bird feeders, they have little drinking portals around the bottom so the birds can insert their beaks to drink and gravity keeps it working correctly. Well, needless to say, our red Solo cup had no such portals. So the bird was quite confused to say the least.

He returned to the cup time after time doing the same thing over and over. All the humming bird had to do was hover a few inches higher and he would have discovered that at the top of the cup was a sea of nectar just waiting for him to devour.

It dawned on me that the humming bird, much like we have, had been trained or conditioned to look at the situation through a particular viewpoint and really didn't understand how to approach the situation any other way.

What does all this, you ask, have to do with our success as human beings?

Have you trained yourself, like the humming bird, to look at situations the same old way, over and over, never really taking time to step back and realize your true potential in any given circumstance? Quite often we need to step back and refocus our efforts in order to see that success can be lying right in front of us.

Albert Einstein defines insanity as; doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. This is not to say that humming birds are insane, quite the contrary, I would venture to say that some of us humans come closer to that definition.

Learn to open your eyes to a much broader concept and teach yourself to always look for a different prospective or viewpoint to each opportunity that presents itself. Then you will be ready to experience success in whatever it is you decide to tackle.