When I was in elementary school I enjoyed telling the story about the professor and the flea.
The professor was studying the jumping ability of the flea. He set up an elaborate measuring device and then said to the flea, “Jump!” In his log book he wrote, “With all its legs the flea can jump 36 inches.” He pulled one leg off the flea and again gave the command, “Jump!” “With one leg missing,” he wrote, “the flea can jump 32 inches.” The good professor removed a third leg and commanded the flea to jump. “With 3 legs removed,” he wrote, “the flea can jump only 23 inches”--and so on until only one leg was left.
As the flea tottered around on one leg the professor gave the order to jump. The flea barely cleared 2 inches. The professor wrote, “With only one leg, the flea can jump only 2 inches.” He then pulled off the flea’s last remaining leg and commanded, “Jump!” The flea didn’t move. Again he ordered the flea to jump but with same result. He picked up his log book and recorded, “With all its legs gone, the flea is deaf.”
I was reminded of the above story when I heard a similar tale recounted by Dallin H. Oaks:
“Two men formed a partnership. They built a small shed beside a busy road. They obtained a truck and drove it to a farmer’s field where they purchased a truckload of melons for a dollar a melon. They drove the loaded truck to their shed by the road where they sold their melons for a dollar a melon. They drove back to the farmer’s field and bought another truckload of melons for a dollar a melon. Transporting them to the roadside, they again sold them for a dollar a melon.
“As they drove back toward the farmer’s field to get another load, one partner said to the other, ‘We’re not making much money on this business, are we?’ ‘No, we’re not,’ his partner replied. ‘Do you think we need a bigger truck?’”
Elder Oaks went on to explain that “We don’t need a bigger truckload of information, either. Like the two partners in my story, our biggest need is a clearer focus on how we should value and use what we already have.”
“Because of modern technology,” he explained, “the contents of huge libraries and other data resources are at the fingertips of many of us. Some choose to spend countless hours in unfocused surfing the Internet, watching trivial television, or scanning other avalanches of information. But to what purpose?
“Those of us who engage in such activities are like the two partners in my story, hurrying to and fro, hauling more and more but failing to grasp the essential truth that we cannot make a profit from our efforts until we understand the true value of what is already within our grasp.”
A poet described this situation as an “endless cycle” that brings “knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word,” in which “wisdom” is “lost in knowledge” and “knowledge” is “lost in information.” (T.S. Eliot, “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”)
“We have thousands of times more available information than Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln,” said Elder Oaks. “Yet which of us would think ourselves a thousand times more educated or more serviceable to our fellowmen than they? The sublime quality of what these two men gave us—including the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address—was not attributable to their great resources of information, for their libraries were comparatively small by our standards. Theirs was the wise and inspired use of a limited amount of information.” (Dallin H. Oaks, “Ensign Magazine,” May 2001, p.82)
Faced with an excess of information in the marvelous resources we have been given, we must begin with focus or we are likely to become like those in the well-known prophecy about people in the last days—“ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7). We will be continuously jumping to erroneous conclusions about fleas and melons.
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