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ROI Reports - Dreaded Malaysian Monkey Trap Claims Another Victim
Trapped in a time trap of her own making, my client had her plate stacked-to-the-gills with the things she needed to do in order to create the results she hired me to help her company produce. And yet, she stubbornly refused to let go of the non-business frivolous activities that ate massive holes into her schedule and she kept falling farther and farther behind in her deadlines.
So many business folk I see are trapped. Trapped by their own doing, admittedly. But the puzzling thing to me is how they can recognize the problem, acknowledge it is a problem, even acknowledge they perpetuate it — yet seem powerless to let go of the bauble and extricate themselves and run like hell to the trees and freedom.
They are caught in their own Malaysian Monkey Trap. And what is the Malaysian Monkey Trap? Thought you’d never ask.
The Malaysian spider monkey lives in the trees of the tropical jungles and in order to catch these wily critters, hunters walk through the jungle and drop heavy containers on the ground. These containers have very a narrow top and a wide bottom. Inside the containers the hunters drop a special kind of nut whose sweetness is particularly attractive to the monkeys.
Later, the sweet scent of the nut lures the monkeys down from the treetops. They reach in, grab the sweet and thus the trap is sprung — becuase you see, the tops of the containers are so narrow they have a tight squeeze to get their hands inside. Once they grab the sweet at the bottom, they are unable to withdraw it because their clenched fist won’t pass through the narrow opening and . . . (remarkably like humans) they stubbornly refuse to let go of their “prize.” You can get a idea of the trap from the above picture.
So instead of letting go of the nut, and since the container is too heavy for them to carry — the monkeys just plop their butts down and just sit there, seemingly helpless. And there they demonstrate another human trait — learned helplessness.
At the end of the day, when the hunters make their rounds, while the monkey will become frantic and terrified at their approach – they still refuse to let go of the sweet in order to gain their freedom. And so they are caught in the trap of their own doing as the hunters pick them up and throw them in a bag.
Seem familiar?
Now before you start laughing about how these primates have been beaten with the wrong end of the evolutionary stick, take a few moments to consider the things you are currently holding on to that no longer make sense in light of your professional objectives.
Are you like my client whose social calendar is so stuffed that her company suffers? She knows this yet refuses to let go and focus on the things that will boost revenues and increase responses. While she self-righteously “keeps her commitments” to her non-business activities, by drips and drabs, she is failing to keep her commitments to her customers because she has no time left over to grow her business.
And for any business to thrive you need to be constantly growing and expanding, testing new strategies and tactics.
And what does this have to do with marketing and writing sales copy? Simply this, if other things are getting in the way of your marketing efforts, then you need to let go of them or risk sitting in stultified wonder as your competitors easily “scoop up” your market.
And if memory serves me correctly, over 1,400 years ago Aesop created a fictional tale to illustrate a similar point. He called it “The Ant And The Grasshopper.”
By Walter |
Topics: Client Top Secret, From The Trenches, Lessons Learned, Marketing Mishaps |
January 23rd, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Dead-on post: It’s sent me into contemplative mode… which begs the question is that mode my ‘nut’ I won’t let go of (cheshire cat grin)?
January 28th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
[...] Kyle McFarlin: Dead-on post: It’s sent me into contemplative mode… which begs the question is that mode my ‘nut’ I… [...]