Similarly, Narcissus, in another famous Greek myth, actually shunned other people before he fell in love with his own reflection, and yet we still talk of someone who is obsessed with their own importance and appearance as being narcissistic. (Or, as the Bible bluntly puts it, the love of money is the root of all evil.) The moral of King Midas, of course, was not that he was famed for his wealth and success, but that his greed for gold was his undoing: the story, if anything, is a warning about the dangers of corruption that money and riches can bring. However, as this last example shows, we often employ these myths in ways which run quite contrary to the moral messages the original myths impart. We describe a challenging undertaking as a Herculean task, and speak of somebody who enjoys great success as having the Midas touch. So we describe somebody’s weakness as their Achilles heel, or we talk about the dangers of opening up Pandora’s box. This feedback is private to you and won’t be shared publicly.The Greek myths are over two thousand years old – and perhaps, in their earliest forms, much older – and yet many stories from Greek mythology, and phrases derived from those stories, are part of our everyday speech. Mark contributions as unhelpful if you find them irrelevant or not valuable to the article. So let's start sharing stories about trying because, just like in the movies, we do not need a happy end for every story to enjoy the show. Because in essence, failure is just an outcome of a process in which we try to find out if something is working or not. The premise of scientific experiments is that although succes is not guaranteed, we still have to try to find out. Something that can help us is to get replace the word 'failing' with 'trying'. Stories about how we fucked up, how we dealt with defeat and what we've learned the hard way do contain a lot of information, for ourselves and others, on how to deal with adversity. So it may not come as a surprise that people, and professionals in particular, are reluctant sharing their stories about failure, and that's a pity. We hear stories success stories about the 'startup company culture' while the stories about the ones that failed, and eventually went bankrupt, rest untold. We have management books telling us the stories about companies that went 'from good, to great'. The most dominant stories are telling us that we should strive for, and be inspired by, success. The stories we believe about what is right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate and fair or unfair do define who we are and how we behave.Īnd that brings me to the topic of succes and failure in organizations. We're a product of the stories that are surrounding us. The way in which we tell, and interpret, stories not only informs us about our culture, it also forms our culture. This may sound trivial, a simple question of semantics so not that important at all, but it isn't. Not surprisingly, about 80% of the students primarily think about Icarus as the one who failed. The second option is that you primarily recall this story as the tale of Icarus failing to fly. Option one, you do remember Icarus as a person who tried flying and was partially successful. The two options, inspired by Jack Gilbert's poem 'Failing and Flying', were pretty straightforward. In a small experiment I asked 120 of my students, attending a Streetwize session on storytelling, how they did primarily remember this story. Icarus ignores the instructions not to fly too close to the sun, the wax in his wings melts and he tumbles out of the sky and falls into the sea where he drowned. Icarus' father asks him not to fly neither too low nor too high to avoid damage to the wings either to the sea's dampness or to the sun's heat. The latter is inspired by Greek mythology and tells the tale of Icarus who wants to escape Crete by means of wings that his father Daedalus constructed from feathers and wax. I've a sweet spot for Iron Maiden's epic metal songs like 'Alexander the Great', 'The Clansman' and off course 'Flight of Icarus'. How stories and semantics are limiting our capacity to learn.
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