Eating the elephant

Aurelian Victor Cotuna
3 min readOct 28, 2019

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“There is only one way to eat an elephant, a bite at a time.” — Desmond Tutu

In our life, there are moments when the task at hand seems daunting, overwhelming and apparently impossible to complete.

If you ever wanted to accomplish something major, you know that getting started is challenging, but completing it is hard and takes time. Maybe you have some vague idea what you want in the beginning, but you have no clue how to get it. That is normal, because the bigger the task, the more complexity it involves, the hardest it is to imagine the end result.

Some people freeze and feel incapable of taking the first step when they realize how big the task is and never come to turn their dream into a reality. This happens because they try to eat the whole elephant in one single bite.

Eating the elephant

We know that the best way to accomplish something big is to break it down into smaller pieces and then deal with one piece at a time. However, most of the time we don’t do this.

Photo by Joaquín Rivero on Unsplash

Why are we running into such trouble?

Most likely we run into such a trouble because we have some kind of fear. We have some believes about the elephant or about ourselves. We run the “I can’t do this” story into our minds so many times that we end up believing it.

Sometimes we might feel that some tasks are taking forever to get done. When this happens and the pressure is placed on us, we struggle. When we have to complete that project and the boss comes up to us and ask “What is taking so long with that project?”, the stress piles up, the tension rises and the whole picture becomes darker. If we have our own business or have to deal with clients, things are even bigger and more stressful.

The trouble is that breaking the challenge into smaller pieces and dealing with every one might not always work as we expect. It is the same with the elephant. Imagine that you have a huge elephant waiting for you to eat it. How much can you eat before it starts to smell? How much can you eat until you become sick of the same flavor and taste?

A solution to this is to give a party, invite some friends over and have some fun. Eating elephant can be fun, it is the same with the big challenge too. Instead of taking one bite at a time, simply cut the elephant into bigger chunks and share it with others. Split the goal into bigger sub goals and ask for help. Try to do things in parallel. The end goal is to finish, not to spend all your time trying to figure things out.

This applies even for really organized, methodical and self disciplined people. Dealing with a hard thing as part of a team, is always better, faster and have overall better results.

Photo by Damian Patkowski on Unsplash

What is the elephant you are dealign with right now?

What do you think about splitting the work into multiple chunks and then delegate it?

Your turn

Through this article series called “Minutes Mindset,” I’m helping you build a solid mindset, writing my point of view on different subjects that we meet in our day by day life. I am a strong believer that once we can understand a subject, we can engage with the idea or refuse it altogether. Both ways are helping us grow and develop our own way of seeing the world.

If you like my work, clap on it, share it with your friends and follow me.

In the end, everything starts with us, with our mind, our self, and even our stories. We can choose to act or Not.

If your fitness trainer can help you get fit in the gym, I will help you get a fit Mindset. Let’s connect on Medium, Linkedin, Twitter and share some Ideas

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Aurelian Victor Cotuna

#Mindset builder, high energy #IT #entrepreneur and #education disruptor. Daily mindset building project on Medium https://medium.com/@aurelianvictorcotun