Five Gallons of Soup: Are You a Moving-Away-From or a Moving-Toward Sort of Person?

When I was a freshman in college, one of my older fraternity brothers once dumped a giant pail of soup over my head while I was eating dinner. This was during my “pledge” period when I was in the process of joining the fraternity.

Each of the kids in my pledge class experienced similar humiliations at one point or another, something that we all endured until we were officially inducted into the fraternity. The older fraternity brothers loved these sorts of pranks and mischief and I am sure it is still going on to this day.

I had suffered this particular indignity because I had not been present at an event the night before where my pledge brothers were blindfolded and individually led out to the front porch of the fraternity house, told to get on their hands and knees, and had a giant plastic trashcan of cold water dumped on them from a porch three stories above. Unfortunately, after being forced to drink almost a fifth of whisky in the hours of hazing leading up to this event, I had passed out on a floor of a bathroom and had been unable to be moved to the front porch to have water dumped on my head.

This soup was among the most humiliating experiences I had ever had. I was with 30 or so other guys who all thought it was hilarious; many were laughing so hard that they fell out of their chairs. I had been sitting at a table, innocently eating my dinner, when the people at the table all got up at the same time, ostensibly to go get some more food. A few seconds later my older fraternity brother came up behind me and dumped five gallons of soup on me. Needless to say, I was extremely shocked and upset.

Instead of remaining incredibly upset and dwelling on it, I decided that I needed to take action and fight back. The kid who had done this to me was older, bigger than me, and had a lot more friends in the fraternity house than I had. Nevertheless, I knew that I would never respect myself if I did not stick up to him and fight back aggressively. I did not want to be known as the sorry kid who had had soup poured over his head.

I had fun for months pulling all sorts of pranks on the guy who did this to me. Eventually, my pranks got so serious and I started pushing the line so much that the president of the fraternity came to speak to me and told me the pranks had to stop. Not only had I returned the favor by dumping soup on the guy–at least three times–I did other menacing things to torment him as well. He started avoiding me, not the other way around.

There was another guy in my fraternity who once got into a big fight with a couple of other kids in the fraternity house, also over someone pouring liquid all over him. He lost the fight and ended up being humiliated in front of a bunch of people. A fight with punches, screaming, and so forth had ensued. Apparently, moments before this, someone had walked up behind the guy and peed on him. I am not going to comment on the humor or the animalistic nature of my fraternity brothers, but I will tell you that they probably thought this was funnier than the soup that had been poured on my head. What was so different about this episode, though, was the ferocity of the guy’s reaction. He appeared to have been genuinely traumatized and was upset to a high degree by what had happened to him–and understandably so.

After this fight, the young man avoided the fraternity house almost completely. He moved off campus and was rarely seen. He would walk around the block so that he would never have to walk by the house. He did not go to parties there, and he pretty much avoided all of the people from the fraternity house the rest of his time in college.

One time, several of us were standing on the front porch of the fraternity house and we saw the guy crossing the street about a block away. It was clear that the guy was trying not to be seen by any of his fraternity brothers.

“What a loser!” one of my fraternity brothers shouted.

I have heard people use the word “loser” in multiple ways throughout my life. This use of the word really stuck with me, though, because this time the guy was being referred to as someone who had given up trying to fit in with the other kids. In this sense, once could say that many people out there are “losers,” to the extent that they are avoiding situations and people that are painful to them.

• Avoidance is a form of being a loser.
• Not challenging yourself is a form of being a loser.
• Giving up is a form of being a loser.

The reaction of other kids in the fraternity house to getting in arguments, being humiliated, and so forth was typically to keep pushing forward and doing their thing.

People react in different ways when negative things happen to them. Have you ever known someone who had a really bad experience, wherein something really awful happened to the person at work, in his or her personal life, or elsewhere?

• The person might have gotten fired.
• The person might have been disgraced or humiliated in a relationship.
• The person might have failed at a very important task.

TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE, PLEASE VISIT US HERE: https://www.bcgsearch.com/bcgceospeaks.php?id=85986