The Parable of the Thanksgiving Turkey
The Parable of the Thanksgiving Turkey comes from The Black Swan, the 2007 best selling non-fiction book by Nassim Taleb about unforseen events.
The story is simple:
A turkey is born on a farm.
Each and every day, the turkey wakes up to a friendly farmer, who feeds the turkey, cleans the coop, and scares off any potential predators.
For 1,000 straight days, the turkey becomes more and more entrenched in its belief that the farmer is good and will always take care of him.
Then on the 1,001st day, which happens to be Thanksgiving, the farmer comes in and kills the turkey to eat it for dinner.
Quoting from the book:
Consider that (the turkey’s) feeling of safety reached its maximum when the risk was at the highest…But the problem is even more general than that…Something has worked in the past, until — well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading.
The lesson I glean from this story: The “truths” we have grown certain of may not always be true. When we have reached the point of maximum comfort with our reality, we may find ourselves surprised, just like the Thanksgiving Turkey.
# References
https://www.sahilbloom.com/newsletter/deconstructing-fears-avoiding-the-big-surprise-more