A friend of my wife sent her a series of photographs she had found somewhere on the Internet. They tell such a simple and powerful story that I felt I had to pass them on. If you’ve already seen them, I apologize, but maybe you’ll be interested in how this might relate to the world of work. I don’t know who took the photographs, so I cannot give that person the credit due to them. Whoever it was, they did a brilliant job.

An object lesson in patience and sleeping on a problem

The story starts with a bridge over a deep ravine on the Old Donner Pass Highway in the northern Sierra Nevada, located above Donner Lake about nine miles west of Truckee, California. A bear was making its way across Rainbow Bridge at Donner Summit one Saturday in 2007, when some vehicles crossing the bridge scared the bear into jumping over the edge. Somehow the bear caught the ledge and was able to pull itself to safety.

There it is, hanging on by its fingernails. It manages to pull itself up, but now there’s no way to get off the bridge and back to safety.

I guess most of us have felt like that sometimes. We’re startled into a sudden decision, hoping to find a place of safety, only to find ourselves going over the edge and facing a long, long fall towards certain disaster.

We manage, somehow, to cling on and prevent the fall, but now we’re stuck. We can’t see a way out. We have nowhere to go and no route back to security.

Stuck in a dark place

The authorities, alerted to the bear’s plight, decided that nothing could be done to help before nightfall.

So there’s the bear. Darkness is coming on. It can’t get off the bridge. It has no food or water.

What would you do?

I suspect many of us would panic and maybe even put ourselves at risk of falling into the ravine below. We would certainly want to do something as quickly as possible.

The next morning

The bear, however, had a better idea. When the authorities returned on Sunday morning, they found the bear sound asleep on the ledge.

In our action-obsessed society, everyone is constantly urging everyone else to “do something” to cure any bad situation. The last option that comes to mind is often the best: to do nothing, stay patient, and wait to see what events bring.

The current financial mess is a good example. Banks and finance houses got themselves — and us — into this mess by a mixture of greed, limited ethics, and deciding that nothing mattered much except short-term profits. Regulation was ignored or evaded by a mixture of accounting sleight of hand and the creation of novel “investment vehicles” that were outside the regulations, because no one had dreamed them up before. The result was a short dash into a Nirvana of easy profit, followed by the current period of staring into the abyss and knowing that you have no obvious way out.

What do they do? Do they wait patiently to see what occurs? Which loans are, in reality, good ones and which have to be written off to experience and a hard lesson learned?

No, they yell loud and long for a government safety net. Are those the same folks who despised regulation and “government interference” in the market when times were good? Who loudly proclaimed the idea that “the market is always right” and asked only to be left alone?

Indeed they are. Only now they’re in a mess — entirely of their own contriving — they want the rest of us, the taxpayers, to bail them out.

The bear didn’t yell, but it did get a safety net.

Rescue comes

After securing a net under the bridge, the rescuers tranquilized the bear, which promptly fell into the net. The net was lowered to the ground. After a few minutes, the bear woke up and walked out of the net.

Let’s look at similar situations as they affect individuals. We get into a mess and feel trapped. Maybe we start to panic. There’s no clear way out. And no authorities on hand to bring us a safety net.

What do we do?

Most people start running around, frantically trying to find a solution. If the bear had done this on the ledge of the bridge, the chances are it would have fallen off. The same is true for us.

No one’s mind works clearly when they feel stressed and panicky. That makes solutions hard to find, even if they’re there. But, if we succumb to the urge to “do something,” it’s very possible that we’ll grab onto the first seemingly viable answer that presents itself. It may help us out, but it’s much more likely to make the problem worse

Learning the lesson

like all the best stories, this one has a moral. The bear was panicked by circumstances (the vehicles on the bridge) into making a bad move. It jumped out of the way, over the edge of the bridge, and found it was hanging on by its nails over a drop into disaster.

Somehow it was able to pull itself up onto a narrow ledge. Now it’s safe from instant death, but still in a very bad situation, with no obvious way out.

What did it do? It slept on the problem. While it was asleep, circumstances changed and the problem took care of itself.

When you’re confronted with a bad situation, sometimes the best solution of all is to do nothing, sleep on the problem, and wait to see what turns up. Patience often succeeds where immediate action only makes things worse — for people and bears.

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