The World According to Bruce the Goldfish
Post #2 in a series on creating better libraries and stronger communities through kindness, empathy and love.
The son of one of my best friends, while in middle school, won a goldfish and named it Bruce. He came home with this fish in a plastic bag and his parents did what any parent would do and bought a little fish bowl for Bruce. They put Bruce in the fish bowl, and for three years, Bruce swam around and around and around the fishbowl. With time, Bruce went from being a little goldfish to a big goldfish. So Mom said, “We need to get a bigger tank for Bruce.” Dad went to the store and didn’t buy a 10-gallon fish tank or a 25-gallon fish tank or even a 50-gallon fish tank. He bought a 90-gallon fish tank for one goldfish. As they brought Bruce over to the new tank, they thought, “We’re going to blow this little fish’s mind!” and they tipped him into the giant fish tank. Much to their dismay, Bruce swam around and around in a tiny circle for ten minutes. He didn’t realize he wasn’t in a little bowl anymore. Pretty soon, however, the circles got bigger and bigger, and Bruce started zipping back and forth across the tank. But it did take a long time for Bruce to realize he wasn’t in that tiny bowl anymore.
So why am I telling you this fish story? Because we’re all like Bruce. We’re all in tiny bowls made of self-doubt and fear and things that are telling us, “You can’t do that.” So we don’t try because we think we’re stuck. But we don’t have to be bound in. We can do whatever we want to do, be whatever we want to be – and whatever the public needs us to be. We, as libraries, are the most dynamic government entity that exists on the face of the Earth. We have more flexibility than anyone else to rise to the occasion, every single time if we have the willingness to do it. We can identify societal needs and meet them – we just need to do it.
My theory on why this impacts us this way has to do with stones and balloons, which I’ll explain in the next post. Until then…
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Lance Werner is a candidate for President of the @AmericanLibraryAssociation. Learn more at LanceWerner.com. #AmericanLibraryAssociation #LibrariesTransform
Javascript Developer at Tacitus Pro
5 年Are you at the ALA (American Library Association) Midwinter conference?
Strategic Consultant and Advocate for Libraries
5 年I love this, "We, as libraries, are the most dynamic government entity that exists on the face of the Earth. We have more flexibility than anyone else to rise to the occasion, every single time if we have the willingness to do it."!!
CEO at Robert Labadie Funaro, PC
5 年Go Bruce!
Risk Analyst at Aon
5 年I had really great business professor at CMU who taught so much more than business. One day he suggested we read Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham. Whether it is Bruce the Fish or Philip Carey the lesson is the same the limits to what we can achieve are largely determined by ourselves not others.
Director of Human Resources and Organizational Development, Kent District Library, Mortimore Consulting, LLC
5 年Ahhhhhh, our old friend Bruce and the lessons we’ve learned from him. ??