This is Earl Nightingale's, "Pumpkin in a jug."
In the fall when the leaves are turning, a chill is in the air and roadside merchants offer fall apples, squash and pumpkins, I am reminded of the farmer who was walking through his pumpkin patch early in the growing season, and while walking near the road that ran by his farm, he found a one-gallon glass jug that some motorist had tossed into his field. He stood looking at the jug for a few moments, and then, for no particularly good reason, he poked a small pumpkin into the jug without damaging the vine.
Later when the pumpkins were full grown and were being picked and stacked, he came across the jug again, this time completely filled with the pumpkin he'd poked inside. The pumpkin had filled the jug completely, and had stopped growing; it was the size and shape of the jug. The farmer took that pumpkin in the jug home and put it on his front porch as a curiosity.
A few days later his son and his wife came to the farm for dinner. They examined the pumpkin in the jug, and after looking at it in silence for a while, the son asked if he could take it to the local college where he taught psychology. "Sure, take it," his father said. "But what are you going to do with it?"
"I'm going to show it to my class and remind them that, that's what happens to things that get poked into pre-determined spaces. That pumpkin never got the chance to reach its full growth, whatever that might have been, because it had been poked into pre-determined limits. Someone had decided what the shape and size of that pumpkin was going to be, and it didn't have any choice in the matter. I want my students to learn a lesson from that pumpkin in a jug. We cannot outgrow the limitations we place on ourselves, or the limits determined by other if we go along with them, so I want them to understand that if they find themselves, as adults, living in cramped circumstances in their work or any other way, it was they who did the poking - it's their responsibility. That pumpkin is a good argument for the importance of education."
Neither the farmer nor his wife had looked at the pumpkin in the jug in just that way, but they thought it could provide a good example. And it did. After the story got out just about every student in the university came to take a look at it and retell the story the young assistant professor had told. And I suppose most of them realized then that if we wind up in spaces too small, if we don't grow to our full stature, it's because we made the decision to stop and not grow any further - if was our decision. It was because we poked ourselves into a space.
People are responsible for their own lives. If they have the power to limit their growth in someway, they also have the power to break through those limitations and grow again.
It takes courage to chart our own courses and choose the higher plateaus of achievement and reward.
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