The King’s Problem: What did we learn?

Every story has a lesson in it. And some very valuable lessons. The very concept of story telling started as a means of imbibing values and spreading the learnings to the coming generations. And likewise for this story. It would be unfair to take the story as just another sheet of words about a King going bald. Instead, we need to explore what the story has to offer to us in relevance to everyday life.

The King was a just ruler until he fell for the trivial problem of baldness. Almost all of our problems emanate from the fact that we do not accept. Baldness, acne and a hundred physical problems, tend to rule over the real problems in our everyday life. I have written earlier about how accepting our problems as our own can make life simpler and easier to live by. But as always, we forget to accept.

It took the wise Minister’s plan to bring the King to his senses. But how many of us do find a wise minister to help us out? In most of the situations, when we are down and out, the entire world will only conspire to bring us down. It is up to us, ourselves, to find our strengths and to accept our weaknesses.

Another lesson, and a worthy lesson at that, is the power of the mind. The mind is always untamed. No matter how much you try to control it, it will always run amok. It takes plenty of hard work and years of practise to make the mind listen to what the heart has to say. No matter how hard the King tried, he always ended up thinking about the exact colour he was not supposed to think about. How many of us can claim to have a mind under control. If you command the mind to behave in a particular way, rest assured, it will behave in exactly the opposite manner. No wonder, then, that we have to struggle for quitting our bad habits.

Another valuable lesson the story has to offer, is that of humility. With more power, we tend to forget out responsibilities and start believing that the entire world is our slave. We have seen it in our everyday lives, haven’t we? “Arrogant” has became an adjective for managers. And why does your best colleague at work, suddenly start acting weird after a promotion? We tend to forget that at the end of our lives, it will not be our success stories but our friends, our people, who would be with us. The best people in the world are the ones who have been humble enough not to let success creep up in their personal lives.

These have been my personal learnings from the story.  If any of you find any more observations or lessons which you think should be included, please do feel free to mention them. After all, not all minds think alike and it would be more than a pleasure to understand how other minds think.