“The same boiling water that softens the potato, hardens the egg. It's what you're made of. Not the circumstances.”

Umm… no.

I’m flabbergasted that those who absently recite this weak aphorism (or post it online) do not see the two fatal flaws. First, human beings are not eggs! Second, boil anything, including eggs, for long enough and all you’ll get is a soupy mess. Some people tolerate bad situations better than others, and some people have access to more resources than others. This is why the wellness industry makes us of many water-based deepities, another being: “We’re not all in the same boat, but we are all in the same storm.” Admittedly, this phrase does acknowledge that individuals have different means to navigate the storms of life, but we are not all in the same storm. I will certainly validate another person’s experiences and life difficulties, but I will not make the mistake of matching my problems with, say, a Uyghur family in a Chinese re-education camp. Those storms are not remotely similar.

Water, especially hot, turbulent water, is used as an aid to explain tough or challenging situations faced by people. A favorite one is:

“If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.”
— Daniel Quinn

I’ve actually used this short story before as an example of how it is difficult to recognize gradual slides into depression. It’s just science-y enough to feel true, but it falls apart when examined with a smidge of critical thinking. “In 2002, Victor H. Hutchison, a retired zoologist at the University of Oklahoma with a research interest in thermal relations of amphibians, said that ‘The legend is entirely incorrect!’ He described how a critical thermal maximum for many frog species has been determined by contemporary research experiments: as the water is heated by about 2 °F (about 1 °C), per minute, the frog becomes increasingly active as it tries to escape, and eventually jumps out if it can.”

Even more astonishingly, this urban myth derived from a study where the scientist removed the brains of the frogs before attempting to boil them. Frogs without brains would not jump out of gradually heated water. One rightly imagines that a human body would not expel itself from slowly boiling water without a brain to tell it to do so.

Now, why all this information about water, frogs, brains, and stressful situations? Well, attention is limited, and writers and speakers like myself need ways to hook the audience. A great way to do that is with a striking visual, which brings me back to anonymous quote at the start of this post:

“The same boiling water that softens the potato, hardens the egg. It's what you're made of. Not the circumstances.”

I want to stroke my beard and appear wise when I recite those words, but I can’t because it reinforces the message that mental toughness is the only way to go through life. A few weeks ago I was in extremely hot water. Staying in that diseased mindset would have proved nothing and the end result would be that I’d only be sicker. I couldn’t turn down the heat in my mind so I turned down the heat in the rest of my life. I went to the hospital, I tried a new acute treatment, I scaled back my personal responsibilities, I went on leave from work.

I’m not an egg, a potato, a ship, or a frog. I’m a human being with the abilities to adapt to my environment (mental toughness) and modify my environment (mental agility) so I don’t have to be as tough all the time. My central goal with Mental Agility is to help people better use their minds during stressful situations so that they can rely on their toughness when that really is the only option left. If that sounds interesting to you and you’d like to schedule a workshop or a webinar for your team or organization that doesn’t rely on pithy wellness axioms, but instead focuses on practical means to de-stress and re-frame hard experiences, please email me at gcorsetti@mentallyagile.com or click the button below to be directed to my contact page.