Point of Thought #2: What’s your Lion?

Storytime!

An artist was standing before a massive stone slab with a hammer and chisel in his hand.

His odious student approached and asked what his intentions were with the overwhelmingly large medium.

The artist replied that he was planning on turning it into a lion. In awe of the painstaking time and labor it would take to accomplish the artist’s goal, the apprentice questioned his teacher’s ability to achieve such an implausible aspiration.

“Are you sure you can do that? It looks impossible,” said the student.

The man replied as he began toiling with the stone, “There’s no such thing as impossible. All I have to do is remove the parts that don’t look like a lion.”

The artist began to set the lion free from the rocky cocoon while he mumbled, “Getting that stone here… that was impossible.”


Although the Artist’s skill transformed the slab into a masterpiece, the sheer scale of the sculpture made his accomplishment that much greater. Do you have an “impossible” slab to chisel? I hope not because nothing is impossible; you just need to take away the parts that don’t look like a lion.


Inspired by an excerpt from Building Brand Value: Seven Simple Steps to Profitable Communications by Bruce Turkel.