The Goose🦆and the Golden eggs🐣

Hey friends,

Well, ain’t my creativity tap dry. I am completely out of ideas on things to write this week since I basically spent every single day of the week indoors.

Something I’m definitely working on, is to get out more. It will not only help my dead social life, but also help me with key insights to write in this newsletter.

Anyway, this week during my endless scroll of Elon Musk’s X, I came across a tweet talking about a famous fable of the Goose that laid the Golden eggs. I quote:

I have never read any other Aesop’s Fables, but I will now. (Consider it a part of my quest to know more of why Greek philosophers are so highly esteemed in the modern world).

The fable is all about effectiveness.

Most people focus on the ‘golden eggs’ when thinking about effectiveness. Producing impressive short-term outcomes (money, social prestige, or enjoying life to the max). But as the fable shows, true effectiveness is a function of two things: what’s produced (the golden eggs) and the producing asset / capacity to produce (the goose).

If you adopt a pattern of life that focuses on golden eggs but neglects the goose, you’ll soon lose the asset that produces those golden eggs for you.

This applies to a lot of other areas in life:

🏦 Financial

Our most important financial asset is our own capacity to earn. If we don’t continually invest in improving our own production capacity (ourselves), we massively restrict how many golden eggs we can produce in future.

I’m still trying this one (staying curious, learning new skills, taking courses). But I know plenty of friends who aren’t.

💔 Relationships

In a romantic relationship, golden eggs are the good times you have with your partner. The goose is the health of the relationship. Maintaining that healthy relationship takes communication, compromise, commitment, etc.

Same thing goes for friendships. You can’t have those fun hangout sessions and crazy times without putting in work to maintain the friendship, keeping in touch, etc. You have to spend time taking care of the goose.

There is a caveat though. If you only take care of the goose with no aim toward the golden eggs, you’ll soon be unable to feed that goose (i.e make a decent living).

All I am trying to say is that, I learned, effectiveness lies in the balance: getting the desired results in a sustainable way.

PS: If you have a few seconds to spare, please hit the <reply> button and let me know what you thought of this email. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it and what could be improved. It also reminds me that there’s another person reading it on the other end of my screen😅. Thanks.

Have a wonderful week ahead!

Reagan.