A fife or a pot

There was an old soviet cartoon that tells a story about a small girl who was too lazy to plunk the berries in a forest. I could understand her – this activity usually involves intensive crawling on the knees and there is no way to avoid bending your back so it certainly would immensely hurt in the evening. So she’d chosen another route and sought help from a dwarf which offered her too options:

Playing on a fife would make the berry-leaves to uncover the berries they were hiding. So it seemed, it was just a question of plunking them up and placing in a pot. But here came a problem. The girl wasn’t allowed to have both items at once: either a fife or a pot. So as soon as she stopped playing the fife and exchanged it for a pot all the berries had gone and instantly got the shelter under the berry-leaves. No way to see them unless to go down on her knees and start slowly and monotonically lifting up each berry-leaves hoping to find a berry beneath it. But it wasn’t part of her plan, so she rushed to the dwarf and exchanged the pot back for the fife, played on it and, miracle! All the berries were plainly visible. But again, where to put them into. So the story got into a loop: she hurried to the dwarf and got the pot in exchange for the fife and the berries just disappeared again. Eventually, the girl had understood that sometimes you just can’t have everything and hard-work is unavoidable.
Why am I telling all that? Well, I’ve been into a long run for a new job opportunity and I’m still in a pursuit and what I’ve noticed that after every single interview I had to put myself into that girl’s shoes but the options now are slightly different:

The problem here is that I’m not afraid of a hard work, like that young lady from a cartoon story, but I don’t want to make any trade-offs and want to have both of these two. Unfortunately for some uncanny reason I’m continuously hitting the same wall again and again. Or maybe I just don’t know when I’m well off?!

Posted on January 24, 2011 at 2:29 pm by sergeyt · Permalink
In: Life

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