What you see up there is not a CGI rendering from a movie. It’s a real animal. An inhabitant of the Australian desert called the thorny dragon.
Let’s call him Trey. Trey does a few very uncommon things:
- He collects dew drops falling from plants on his back, where they remain on his spiny, rough skin.
- Trey then sends those dew drops to his mouth via his capillaries with one simple “chewing” motion.
- This means he can literally “suck up” water by just standing in it.
- He follows a simple, one-item diet: ants. Trey eats nothing but ants.
- Lastly, Trey has a second, fake head on top of his real one, which he can present to enemies by bowing down and hopefully get away without much damage.
Pretty cool, huh? So how come you’ve never heard of Trey? I mean, he’s not the national animal of any country, there are few clips of him on Youtube and he hasn’t been on the cover of Forbes.
However, Trey, much like his fellow thorny dragons, has a lifespan of 15 to 20 years, which is an eternity in animal land. A few more evolutionary cycles and they’ll close in on the masters of longevity: turtles.
When we look for success, we usually turn to the commonalities of those, who’ve made it to the top. But what if we’re wrong?
Maybe, the only commonality of making it to the top is to not share many commonalities with others.
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