Ten Apples Up On Top

Every night Madison (our 2 year old) makes me read the not-so-well known Dr. Suess book, Ten Apples Up on Top. She calls it simply "Apples on Top."

The story is pretty simple - three characters: a dog, a lion, and some other figure all challenge each other to put as many apples on top of their heads as possible. It starts out with one, then two, and pretty soon seven, nine, and yes, ten. As they're doing this they keep upping the ante on each other, seeing of they can hop around and drink (milk, I assume) while they're suspending all these apples on top of their heads.

So for the first half of the book you have these three individuals living in this very creative, challenging, semi-competitive, highly imaginitive environment full of innovation and friendly one ups-manship (if that's a word.)

And everything is going along fine until they encounter a bear that starts attacking them with a mop. There's no real reason for this; you never really know the beef that the bear has with these apple-stackers, but it becomes very clear that this bear wants nothing more in the world than to knock the apples off of each of these guys' heads.

Then, if that wasn't enough, there's another bear that's attacking them with some type of tennis racquet and then a flock of flying geese show up and try to attack the apples from above. So they are attacked from all sides, and in a line that is classic to Dr. Suess:

"They will get them if we let them.
Come, we cannot let them get them."

So it dawned on me the other night that the three characters stacking apples on their heads are a lot like today's visionary leaders: they're bold, outside of the box, and competitive. But they are also colloborative - they aren't content to keep their wild ideas to themselves, but they love sharing their challenges with others and letting others provide input and improvement. They all get better as they push one another.

But for every one of those there seems to be a dozen of the bear-like character, whose whole goal is to knock the apples off the heads of the innovators with a mop or some other type of object.

These are the folks who are afraid of originality, or even progress, and so they take a swipe at everything they see that looks out of place. Sure, the apple-stackers are loud and obnoxious, and they are definitely disturbing the peace.

The book ends with all of the characters crashing into a giant apple cart, and on the last page everyone has apples on top of their heads, even the angry bears and the crazy geese. But they're all happy and now see how much fun it can be to put apples up on top. Hey, it's a kid's book, it's got to have a happy ending.

So which one are you? Are you the one with the new ideas and the wild vision? Do you feel like you're always trying to proctect yourself from the People of the Mop?

Or are you a critic? Do you find yourself first criticizing, either verbally or internally, every new idea simply because its new or different? Worse yet, have you ever found yourself wanting to squash someone else's idea simply becuase you don't fully understand it?

The moral of the story is, Either you've got apples on your head or you've got a mop trying to knock down someone else's.