“But every time they’re knocked down, they stand up. YOU CAN NOT DESTROY THESE PEOPLE. And at the end of their lives, they’ve accomplished what they set out to do!”
Bringing a giraffe into the world is a tall order. A baby giraffe falls 10 feet from its mother’s womb and usually lands on its back. Within seconds of hitting the ground, it rolls over and tucks its legs under its body. From this position, it considers the world for the first time and shakes off the last vestiges of the birthing fluid from its eyes and ears. Then, the mother giraffe lowers her head long enough to take a quick look. Afterwards, she positions herself directly over her calf. She waits for about a minute, and then she does the most unreasonable thing. She swings her long, pendulous legs outward and kicks her baby, so that it is sent sprawling head over heels. When it does get up, the violent process is repeated over and over again. The struggle to rise is momentous. As the baby calf grows tired, the mother kicks it off its feet again.
Why? She wants it to remember how it got up. In the wild, baby giraffes must be able to get up as quickly as possible to stay with the herd, where there is safety. Lions, hyenas, leopards, and wild hunting dogs all view young giraffes to be easy prey. If the mother didn’t teach her calf to get up quickly, the calf would get eaten in the tough world.
The late Irving Stone Underwood spent a lifetime studying greatness, writing novelized biographies of men such as Michelangelo, Vincent van Gogh, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin. Stone was once asked if he had found a thread that runs through the lives of all these exceptional people. He said, “I write about people who sometime in their life have a vision or a dream of something that should be accomplished, and they go to work. They are beaten over the head, knocked down, vilified, and for years they get nowhere. But every time they’re knocked down, they stand up. YOU CAN NOT DESTROY THESE PEOPLE. And at the end of their lives, they’ve accomplished what they set out to do!”