*Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle–when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.
*
It’s like the two hikers who encounter a bear in their path. One hiker gets a pair of running shoes from his backpack and puts them on. The other hiker says, “Are you crazy? You can’t outrun a bear!” The first hiker says, “I know I can’t outrun a bear. I just need to outrun you.”
The quote is also nonsensical because lions don’t run just because the sun comes up. They sleep a lot, conserve their energy, stalk carefully, and run only when they think they have a good shot at making a kill. In other words, their behavior is the polar opposite of the activity for activity’s sake which the quote seems intended to inspire.
[I know, deconstructing motivational speaker buzz-speak is a waste of time. It’s like worrying about whether you *really can* boil a frog to death by slowly heating up the water. (You can’t.) ]
Problem is, we don’t live on the savannah anymore, and actually running isn’t what keeps us fed or alive. In modern society, the predicament translates to: “When the sun comes up, you’d better make sure you get to work on time, to spend another day performing repetitive, mind-numbing tasks in a small cubicle.”