Life Struggles – Story on Self Confidence

In a city, there lived a chef with his family. One day, the daughter complained to her father that her life was miserable. She did not know how she would make it and was tired of struggling and fighting all the time. As one problem gets solved, another one follows soon.

Hearing those words, the chef took his daughter to the kitchen. He filled the three pots with water and put each pot on a high fire.

After the water in the three pots started to boil, he added potatoes in one pot, eggs in the second pot and ground coffee beans in the third pot. He then let them sit and boil, without telling anything to his daughter.

The daughter groaned and impatiently waited, wondering what her father was doing. He turned off the burners after twenty minutes. He took the potatoes from the pot and placed them in a bowl. He pulled the eggs from the other pot and placed them in a bowl. He then ladled the coffee from another pot and poured it in a cup.

Looking at his daughter, he asked, “Daughter, what do you see?” She hastily replied, “Potatoes, eggs and coffee”. The father said to look closer and touch the potatoes. She did and observed that they were soft.

The father asked her to take an egg and break it. She observed the hard-boiled egg after pulling off the shell. Finally, he asked the daughter to sip the coffee. The rich aroma of the coffee brought a smile to her face.

She asked, “Father, what does this mean?”

He then explained that the potatoes, the eggs and the coffee beans each faced the same adversity, which is the boiling water. However, each one reacted in a different way.

The potato went strong, hard and unrelenting, but it became soft and weak in boiling water. The egg was fragile, with the thin outer shell protecting its liquid interior until it was added to the boiling water. Then the egg became hard inside. But, the ground coffee beans were unique. After they were added to the boiling water, they changed the water and created something new.

“Which one are you?” he asked his daughter. “When adversity knocks on your door, how do you respond? Are you a potato, an egg, or a coffee bean?”

Moral of the story

In life, things happen around us, and things happen to us, but the only thing that matters is how you choose to react to it and what you make out of it. Life is about learning, adopting and converting all the struggles we experience into something positive.