·5 Important Lessons From Squirrels For A Better Life

Raymond Marlborough  Sep 15, 2021

Love them or loathe them, these furry acrobats have lessons to teach.

Squirrels divide opinion, you either love their acrobatics and furry antics or are tearing your hair out as they evade your latest defenses to devour all the seed that you have left out for the birds.

While I was living in England our house backed onto a wood which had a lively squirrel population in addition to birds of all types, foxes and even deer on occasion. My wife and I got to observe squirrel behavior up close and were also trying and failing mostly in stopping them getting to the seeds that we left out for the birds.

We learnt a lot from the squirrels that could be lessons for our, in theory anyway, more evolved species. Here are our top 5 lessons:

Always Be Curious And On The Lookout For Opportunity

Squirrels in our garden were always exploring, looking under every leaf and rustling through the plants in the garden on the lookout for opportunity, they would sit on a tree branch opposite our window and look in at us, curious about what we were doing.

Often in this exploring they would find something, a fallen nut or piece of fruit that we had thrown from the window, and when they did find it they would grab it wholeheartedly and rush to a safe spot, devouring everything they could and discarding what was not for them.

How often do we look at an opportunity from the outside and analyse it and second guess before we embrace it? We spend so much time looking at it that it has often passed by before we truly commit to it. We should act more like squirrels (of course taking safety into account) and dive into an opportunity, but also not be afraid to discard it if it is not what we needed.

Don’t Stop At The First Sign Of Difficulty, Persevere

Squirrels really want nuts and seeds and are very motivated to get them and there is a whole industry designing and building bird feeders that are squirrel proof and people are always trying to find new ways to keep their birdseed away from hungry squirrels and mostly, failing.

From watching the squirrels in my garden, I think that the clear reason for this is in addition to their intelligence, squirrels have a remarkable sense of perseverance. Once they have identified something that they want they will devote themselves to working out a way to get it.

They will try one approach and fail and then sit on a nearby branch for a few minutes with their eyes locked on their prize and then try a different approach and then another and another until they achieve their goal, or they discover that it is truly impossible to reach and even then, they will occasionally revisit the problem to see if anything has changed.

I know that in my life I have seen something that I want to achieve given it a try and failed and then decided that it obviously wasn’t for me. But how many things that are truly worthwhile are attained easily on the first try?

If we have a goal that we truly believe in then we have to keep trying, this is not blind trying just rushing in and doing any old thing, but after failing sit back for a moment, think through why the approach didn’t work and look for an alternative strategy and then after truly exhausting all strategies you can declare the goal unattainable, but just like the squirrel we should come back every so often to see if something has changed to make our goal available.

Practice Your Skills To Keep Them Sharp

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https://medium.com/writers-blokke/5-important-lessons-from-squirrels-for-a-better-life-a0596671bbf9