An Eagle or a Chicken?

Norman Vincent Peale wants you to refuse to believe there are things you cannot do. This excerpt is from his book, You Can If You Think You Can.

Ever hear the parable about the eagle who thought it was a chicken?

One day, so the store goes, an adventurous young boy climbed high in the mountains near his father's chicken farm and found an eagle's nest. He took an egg out of the nest, brought it back to the farm, and put in with the chicken eggs under a setting hen. The hen sat on the eggs until they hatched and out came a little eaglet along with the chicks. The eaglet was raised among the chickens and never knew it was anything else than a chicken. For a while it was content and lived a normal chicken's life.

But as it began to grow there were strange stirrings within. Every once in a while it would think, "There must be more to me than a chicken!" But it never did anything about it until one day a tremendous eagle flew over the chicken yard. The eaglet felt strange new strength in its wings. It became aware of an enormous heartbeat in its breast. And as it watched the eagle, the thought came, "I'm like that. A chicken yard is not for me. I want to climb to the sky and perch on mountain crags."

It had never flown, but the power and instinct were within. It spread its wings and was lifted to the top of a low hill. Exhilarated, it flew to a higher hilltop and finally on into the blue to the summit of a high mountain peak. It had discovered its great self. 

Remember that nobody can be you as efficiently as you can. But you must discover your truly great self. For then you will know that you can, because you will have learned to think that you can. You will have found yourself. So, to complete our little parable, what do you say we stop being a chicken and be the eagle that is within us! it can be exciting, too!

But of course, someone may say, "That's a pretty parable. But after all, I'm neither a chicken nor an eagle. I'm a human being. Just an ordinary one, at that, and I never expect to do anything much with myself." Perhaps that is just the trouble; you never expect to do anything much with yourself. It is a fact, a very serious fact, that we peg ourselves at just about the level of our self-expectations.

Refuse right now to believe there are things you cannot do. Some of the greatest things in this world have been accomplished by men and women who never knew what they couldn't do. So, not knowing, they just went right ahead and did it.