There’s a story about a butterfly I heard recently.
A man sees it struggling to emerge from its cocoon.
Wanting to help, he cuts the cocoon open.
The butterfly emerges and survives.
But its wings never develop.
It can’t fly.
The man’s intervention wasn’t cruelty.
It was misunderstanding.
He’d assumed the struggle was the problem.
When in fact, the struggle was the process.
Most advice given to entrepreneurs comes from a similar misunderstanding.
It assumes struggle means something’s wrong.
That it’s a sign something needs to be fixed, improved or optimised.
So the advice focuses on some form of intervention.
Clarity
Strategy
Habits / Behaviours
Mindset
Something to improve or to help the self that’s struggling.
In other words: what to do to become a much better caterpillar.
And to be fair, a lot of this advice works.
Up to a point.
It helps us crawl faster.
It helps us survive on the branch.
It may help us reach much higher branches.
But it never leads to flight.
The entrepreneurs and business owners I work with aren’t in need of rescue or self-improvement.
Many are very successful.
They’ve worked hard.
They’ve pushed through.
They’ve endured the pressure, setbacks and heartaches.
And at some point, something has become clear.
Endlessly working on the caterpillar isn’t working.
This moment is pivotal and yet it’s so often misinterpreted.
For many, the response is to invest in a new caterpillar improvement initiative.
But what if the cocoon is perfectly doing its job?
Because it is.
Struggle and striving and difficulties have an intelligence to them.
They don’t exist to punish us or toughen us up.
They don’t exist to make us more resilient or better at striving.
They exist to exhaust a false identity.
As long as we believe we are the caterpillar, one way or another life will keep inviting us to outgrow that belief.
Sometimes gently.
Sometimes not.
The problem is not that we haven’t improved ourself or our business enough.
The problem is we’ve been trying to perfect something we were never meant to remain.
We were never meant to become a better caterpillar.
We were meant to discover the caterpillar was never who we truly are.
When this is recognised, focus re-aligns by itself.
Work becomes easier, cleaner, simpler and authentic.
Decisions become easy.
And realising what we’d love stops feeling like constant self-management.
Flight isn’t something we have to earn.
It happens naturally when we stop interfering with the process.
Until then, no amount of advice on how to crawl better will satisfy what knows it was born to fly.
If this resonates, I’ve expanded on this perspective in a short manifesto here.