The Father and His Sons

From his deathbed, a father shared his final words with his two sons:

“Hidden somewhere in our orchards is a great treasure.”

Taking him at his word, the sons dug through the land in search of it. They found no gold or jewels. But through the care and effort they put into working the soil, the orchard produced exceptional harvests worth far more than any buried fortune.

This story comes from The Father and His Sons, an Aesop fable often summarized with morals like “industry is itself a treasure” or “good counsel is the best legacy.”

Those are fine lessons but I think the story offers something more valuable, the father’s grasp of human psychology.

He didn’t simply encourage his sons to work harder. He reframed the reward in a way that prevented limiting beliefs from derailing their progress.

With the new year just days away, many people are writing goals and resolutions.

Unfortunately, most of those goals will be abandoned by March or sooner.

At the heart of most failed resolutions are limiting beliefs. Let’s improve your odds of business and personal success by using the real lessons from Aesop’s fable to disrupt them.

“I Can’t” versus “I Won’t”

A limiting belief is a false construct, usually rooted in core fears around safety, belonging, or being loved.

They often originate from painful or negative experiences. To make sense of that event and to especially prevent future pain, we create conclusions about ourselves or the world.

Because the experience was emotionally charged, those conclusions or beliefs become embedded in the subconscious. From there, your brain runs on autopilot, repeating the belief and selectively gathering evidence to support it. This is known as confirmation bias.

Over time, these negative feedback loops become difficult to break, assuming you ever become consciously aware of them to begin with.

Take public speaking. Roughly 80% of people rank it as their number-one fear, even ahead of death.

Not literal death, but something that feels just as threatening:

“If I fail, I won’t be accepted. I won’t be safe. I’ll be rejected.”

So people avoid public speaking at all costs.

But here’s the question:

Would you give a TED Talk for $1 million?

Most people would.

So what changed?

The fear didn’t disappear. Even the most seasoned speakers and performers report feeling some level of fear before a performance. What changed or more accurately what was disrupted was the negative feedback loop associated with the limiting belief.

The real enemy of limiting beliefs isn’t fear itself but the subconscious’ filtering mechanism. The downside is repeated and amplified, the upside is discarded and minimized.

But when the upside becomes tangible and overwhelming, that filter breaks. The illusion collapses.

That’s the brilliance of the father in the fable.

In one final statement, he:

• Articulated the reward as substantial: “a great treasure.”

• Removed certainty around timing. As it was “hidden”, it could be found in a month or in five years.

• Cemented belief. Most importantly, the sons believed it existed. Why wouldn’t they? Why would a dying father lie in his final moments?

Had he simply explained that hard work might lead to a better harvest, the sons’ subconscious could have filtered the memories of droughts, infestations, and bad luck. They may have quit early, convincing themselves that farming was just too hard.

You might be thinking:

“Fine, but no one is offering me $1 million to give a speech.”

Maybe not.

But the value of becoming someone who can confidently speak in public easily exceeds $1 million.

Warren Buffett once told a group of MBA students:

“I’ll pay any one of you $200,000 today for 10% of your future earnings. If you can communicate well, I’ll pay you double.”

His observation was that strong communication skills can double your earning potential.

Even at a $60,000 annual salary, doubling that over a 20-year career exceeds $1 million so his assumption is grounded in reality.

The first step to overcoming the limiting belief is articulating the value. The trick is using all three components of the father’s statement to disrupt your own limiting beliefs.

How to Disrupt Limiting Beliefs

Let’s apply the father’s framework to a common New Year’s resolution: weight loss.

1. Award: Make the Value Unmistakable

Your subconscious will have all of the reasons why you might fail. Your job is to clearly and fully articulate the upside.

Don’t just say, “I want to lose 20 pounds.”

List as many benefits as you can in detail:

• I’ll feel better in my clothes

• I’ll get to buy new clothes

• I’ll be more confident

• I’ll have more energy

• I’ll reduce long-term health risks and costs

• I’ll be able to do things I cannot do today (hiking trip, etc.)

Make the reward impossible for your subconscious to dismiss. Research dollar values or other quantifiable measures for each benefit if you can.

For example, if your improved fitness adds an extra hour of energy per day to commit to your business, that adds up to 365 hours in a year (approximately 45 working days). What impact to your business or life could you make with over a month and a half of additional high energy time?

These aren’t fanciful assumptions but real value most people never fully consider. Once you discover, then put them in writing, they are hard to ignore.

2. Timing: Relax the Timeline

Be impatient with inputs, patient with outcomes.

I wrote about this concept just last week.

Start immediately, but expect progress to be non-linear. Even if you’re working toward a deadline such as getting in shape for vacation in three months, give yourself room. Everything takes longer than you think.

Quitting usually happens when expectations are too rigid. When your waistline isn’t where you thought it would be after two weeks many quit. That is why the gym is packed until January 20th then turns into a ghost town.

Be aggressive in your pursuit. Start immediately. Kick perfectionism to the curb. Learn quickly from your mistakes. The results will come. They just won’t come exactly when or at the rate you expect.

It’s the consistency paradox. Nothing happens until everything happens.

3. Belief: Shift Your Identity

As James Clear explains in Atomic Habits, behavior change follows identity change.

Said differently, you must believe you’re that person before you become it.

To achieve your fitness goals, tell yourself:

• I am someone who works out regularly, regardless of whether I feel like it

• I am someone who eats healthy and plans ahead to make sure I have healthy options

You’re not trying to become that person. You’re deciding that you already are. Once you believe it, your subconscious will want to maintain consistency and the new behaviors will run on autopilot.

The Next Step

Take your personal and business goals for the year and run each one through this framework.

Clearly articulate the value.

Don’t let perfection or a date on the calendar delay your start.

Expect progress to be uneven and keep going anyway.

Most importantly, shift your beliefs.

Overwrite your subconscious programming and achieve your goals faster and easier than you thought possible.

My goal with The Leap is to provide you each Saturday with the knowledge, tools and lessons learned to help you get started and keep going toward building your future. 

Whether you are making the leap to startups, solo-entrepreneurship, freelancing, side hustles or other creative ventures, the tools and strategies to succeed in each are similar.