Greetings!
I’m out here in Tucson Arizona and early this morning I saw a strange looking little winged beast staring me down in the middle of the path I was hiking.
It didn’t fly away, instead it just sprinted across the street.
Not knowing what it was, I took a picture and then googled the image.
It was a road runner but looked nothing like the one in the cartoons. So I read up on it a little.
Care to take a guess the top speed of a Road Runner?
Now how about the top speed of a coyote?
Nope. Guess again.
A road runner tops out at 20 mph.
While coyotes have been clocked at 43 mph!
Yep, you’ve been lied to all these years.
Every kid (or adult) who has seen the Warner Brothers cartoon with Wile E. Coyote chasing the road runner has been deceived.
It was the original #FakeNews.
The road runner always won and rather easily by simply outrunning the coyote. The road runner was perfect.
And a funny thing happened with that cartoon. ..
Over the years a lot more people rooted for the coyote than the road runner. Why?
Because Wile E. Coyote was a more relatable character. He was an imperfect creature with rough edges. He made mistakes, hurt himself on occasion, got humiliated, didn’t give the illusion of perfection and failed publicly. Yet he kept persevering.
I share all of this with you for two reasons:
1. Just like the rest of the American population, you probably assumed that road runners were a lot faster than coyotes. Because that’s what Warner Brothers sold you as truth on TV.
2. The same thing happens to you every day today. It’s just usually happening online instead of on network TV, in the form of…
Fake Amazon and Yelp reviews, authors who bought their way onto the NY Times best-seller list, staged photoshoots of goo-roos next to the Lear jet and Bentley they rented for the day to give the illusion of success.
These are the “road runners” that litter the internet in 2019.
And sadly, just like that legendary cartoon, people still simply take what they see online and believe it at face value. No proof and questions asked.
P.T. Barnum famously said “A sucker is born every minute.”
Be better than that.
Be smarter than all the sheep. Look beneath the surface, ask better questions, be intellectually curious, read/study more and seek authenticity not perfection from those you learn from.
And if you want to become a better leader, you can learn from this story about an imperfect man with rough edges who shares his successes as well as failures: https://coachbru.com/product/seeds-of-success/
Be Your Best,
John Brubaker
CoachBru.com