Excerpt from Joseph Sugarman (“The Adweek Copyright Handbook”):
Have you ever looked at a circus elephant anchored to the
ground? If you have, you might notice that the elephant has a metal collar
around its leg to which it is attached a small chain. And the chain is attached
to a wooden peg driven into the ground. Pretty good protection?
Pretty lousy, if you ask me. That 12,000-pound elephant could
very easily pick up its foot and with one fell swoop yank the peg out of the
ground and walk away. But the elephant doesn’t. Why? I’ll explain.
When that elephant was still a baby, that same collar and chain
and peg were used to hold the elephant in place. The restraint was sufficient
to hold the baby elephant in place even if it wanted to break way. And break
away is indeed what the baby elephant tried to do.
So every day while the baby was chained up, it would pull at the
chain and pull and pull and pull until finally a cut appeared on its leg
exposing the sore sensitive layers of deep skin tissue. It hurt to pull like
that and soon the baby elephant, realizing the effort was both futile and
painful, stopping trying to escape.
As the baby elephant grew older, it never forgot that bad
experience with the chain and the peg. And so whenever it was anchored down in
a sport, it would think, ‘Hey, it’s impossible to break away and besides, it
hurts.’
The adult elephant had what I call an ‘assumed constraint.’ And
all of us have the same problem to one degree or another.
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