"How do you eat an elephant? You take it one bite at a time." Yeah, but what about taking those bites? What if you're not hungry?
As someone who never heard of this phrase before, it gives the same energy as “How to put a giraffe into a fridge”, it just sounds hilarious. I wouldn’t see it as a advice if I heard it in real life, like no way I could finish an entire elephant before it starts to rot!
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For me, it is “If you can’t change the world, change yourself”. While it has a message for arrogant people to not expect the world to move around them, as a kid who was mistreated a lot, when someone tells me this, it only came off as “Suck it up, the only way we will stop treating you like shit is to be a ‘normal’ human being and blend in”. Its like they are blaming me for being builled :(