Timeless Lessons from ‘Simon Says’

If you know the rules of ‘Simon Says,’ you’ll get a kick out of this story. An influential speaker stood on stage in front of 6000 audience members and in an effort to impart some knowledge on the group, he asked them to play along. 

After knocking out most of the participants fairly quickly, he soon narrowed the entire audience down to one winner. He asked the winner to stand up and then promptly asked the woman next to him a question. “When did you get eliminated?” he asked. 

“Very early on,” she chuckled. His follow up question was the most critical, though. He asked her, “Did you think you would win when we started?” She didn’t. He asked a few other audience members if they thought they would win and they, too, claimed that with so many participants that they didn’t assume they’d win either.

Finally, he asked everyone to raise their hands if they thought they would win when the game of Simon Says began. Only a few dozen hands were raised. 

This was the moral of the story. 

The speaker made his point this way. “The first mistake was thinking that you were competing against 6000 people,” he offered. “In reality, you were only competing against these few dozen people and that changes things.”

Life is the same. You must first believe you can before you accomplish the remarkable things you want in life. So few people actually believe they can win, that the competition is much more slim than you might think. 

Keep going.