Dr Peter Hughes - The bad habits of elephants and entrepreneurs

How can you chain a circus elephant to a stake in the ground using nothing more than a thin piece of rope? It's quite simple as long as you understand elephants. When the elephant is young, you tie it to large stakes using chains.

The elephant could now escape if it believed escape was possible. The fact that it stays there, placid and defeated, is because the belief it now has about the impossibility of breaking free is far stronger than any chains that bind it.

At first, the elephant uses all its strength to break free. Unable to break the chains that bind it, the elephant tires of the struggle and gives up. You can now remove the chains and the large stakes and replace them with a much smaller stake and a thin rope.

The elephant could now escape if it believed escape was possible. The fact that it stays there, placid and defeated, is because the belief it now has about the impossibility of breaking free is far stronger than any chains that bind it.

This pattern of behaviour is common to people and starts as soon as we are born. As babies we are born with more neurons than we retain into adulthood. We simply discard the neuronal connections that we don't use.

This process where experience is literally sculpting the brain is called 'pruning'. It is the basis of the habits and beliefs we carry into adulthood. These habits are not formed in response to how the world is. They are formed in response to how we believe it to be and they form the fabric of who we are.

So if you were to suggest to me that our primary drive is sex or food or money, I would have to disagree. Our primary drive is to do what is familiar and it is a habit we learn from the moment we are born. It is also the hardest thing to recognise and to discard. It can serve us well as we seek to ground ourselves in a world that is familiar. It can paralyse us when circumstances change and we need to adapt.

As entrepreneurs we are facing challenging times. The habits that got us to where we are might not be the ones to help us in the current climate. Doing what we've always done only works when we're doing it in a stable environment.

We have a choice: think of new ways of selling, marketing and developing our products and services or just like the elephant, sit down at our desks, unable to adapt to change and accept our fate.