When You Send Ducks to Eagle School

It was a Wednesday afternoon, April 29th, 1998, at a school in Togo, a small country in West Africa. Physical education class had just started, and the assignment for the day was a one kilometre run.

There were seven of us on the field. When the whistle blew, five of the guys took off with a pace that felt almost unfair. Within the first couple hundred meters they had put real distance between themselves and the rest of us.

That left two of us behind. My friend and I.

We weren't slacking off. We were pushing as hard as we could. We just kept finishing last, and by a wide margin. This wasn't a one-time thing either. It had been the same story for weeks. Our instructor pulled us aside after class one day, genuinely puzzled. He knew we were fast. He'd watched us do well in the 100 meter sprint plenty of times. So in his mind, if we could sprint like that, there was no good reason we shouldn't also do well over a kilometre. It made sense on paper. It didn't play out that way in real life.

Two years passed. Same school, same instructor, same one kilometre run. My friend and I had kept training that whole time. We ran more, we pushed harder, we tried every bit of advice we were given. And we still finished behind the runners who had the natural gift for distance.

That's when it finally clicked for both of us. We weren't built for that race. Our strength was in short bursts of speed, not in sustaining a pace over distance. We got somewhat better, but we were never going to compete with guys whose bodies were simply wired differently for endurance. No amount of effort was going to change that.

I didn't think much about that season of my life again until years later, when I came across something Jim Rohn used to say. He described this exact situation as sending ducks to eagle school.

Picture it. You take a duck and enroll it in a school built to train eagles. You teach it everything an eagle needs to know. How to climb, how to ride the wind, how to dive from great heights. The duck shows up every day and works hard. And after all that effort, it becomes a slightly better duck. It still doesn't fly like an eagle, because it was never built to. All you get, in the end, is a very well trained quack.

I think about that story often when I look at how we lead people.

We take someone who's genuinely gifted in one area and place them somewhere that requires a completely different kind of strength, then get frustrated when the training doesn't close the gap. A great salesperson gets promoted into management and struggles, because leading people and closing deals aren't the same skill. A brilliant technical mind gets pushed into a client-facing role because someone assumed talent transfers automatically. A visionary founder gets asked to run daily operations, and everyone wonders why the wheels start coming off.

None of these people lack effort or character. They're often working harder than anyone else in the room, the same way my friend and I trained harder than most of our classmates. The problem isn't a lack of discipline. It's that they've been asked to run a race they were never designed to run.

This doesn't mean people shouldn't grow, or that we lower the bar. Growth matters. But there's a difference between helping someone develop and expecting training alone to override how they're naturally wired.

"The better question isn't 'why can't this person perform like everyone else.' It's 'what race were they actually built to run.'"

I've thought back to that field in Togo more than once over the years, usually at moments when I was the instructor in the story instead of the runner. It's easy to see someone's effort and assume that effort alone should produce the same results as someone else's natural gift. It rarely does. What effort actually deserves is the right race to run.

I think about the people I've led, or worked alongside, who spent years being coached toward a version of themselves that wasn't quite theirs. Some of them improved. Few of them thrived. And I wonder now how much of that could have been different if someone had simply asked what they were built for instead of what they were falling short of.

That's the shift worth making — both for the people we lead and for ourselves. Not more pressure to become something we're not, but a clearer eye for what we already are, and the patience to build something on top of that instead of around it.