There once was a strange jungle full of boobuan monkeys. Boobuans were monkeys with long arms and short legs, who spent all their time adorning their arms and brightly coloured bracelets. They were often visited by Mambo the macaque, carrying his cart full of bracelets and rare items. During his visits, he appeared with incredible enormous and shiny bracelets, the most beautiful he had ever taken. And also the most expensive, because never before had price been so high. All boobuans but the cautious Nico, ran around picking up bananas to pay for their bracelets. As they were so expensive, they had to be the best ones.
But Nico was safekeeping bananas for the future, and often doubted whether all those bracelets were worth it; he thought they were too expensive. But since he didn’t want to miss the visit of Mambo, he looked among its rare items for something interesting, finding a box full of strange twists irons. “They are useless, Nico,” the seller told Nico, “You can keep them in exchange for a couple of bananas.”
Thus, Mambo having sold the bracelets, left the boobuans happy and smiling. However, they soon began to realize that wearing the bracelets with their broad and elongated arms, was a real challenge, it allowed no movement of either the left nor right arm and it became even worse since they couldn’t do the most important thing in the life of a boobuan – plucking bananas. They tried taking off their bracelets, but could not do so. And then it turned out that everyone wanted bananas from Nico, which were the only ones across the jungle that were not on trees. Thus, overnight, Nico became the richest and most respected boobuan in the jungle.
The best thing was that the box of rare twisted irons Nico found as interesting and cheap, proved to be a toolbox, and when Nico discovered its many utilities, not only was he able to release other boobuans of those stupid bracelets, but they found plenty of ways to use them to achieve amazing things.
And that was how, thanks to the wisdom of Nico, boobuans realized that the price of things has nothing to do with its actual value and that getting carried away by the fads and other messages of the sellers is a sure way to end up with problems.
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MORAL – Do you sometimes behave like a boobuan? Being carried away by the trends, without really taking time to think things through? I realise that many of us attend events organized by marketers or even those who are running all sorts of schemes and we are sold on them, even before taking the time to think about the consequences of the commitment both financially and time-wise. Some of us invest in businesses before doing basic research and end up incurring losses. Just like the boobuans, we get into things out of excitement which then lock us from doing the most important things in our lives thus costing us time & money.
Some of us associate the price of something with quality and our greed makes us purchase expensive items without considering their value to us. Ask yourself questions such as, how much is it costing me? The monkey’s purpose in life is to collect bananas which cannot be done with the bracelets on. Does the value of what you are getting into equate to your purpose? So, next time someone is trying to convince you about a product, a programme, a project or whatever it is, think twice and be cautious before committing. To read more posts by Mercy, click HERE
Photo Credit: wac.net/
