Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions—they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images —ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.

Even the most abstract business strategy must eventually show up in the tangible actions of human beings. It’s easier to understand those tangible actions than to understand an abstract strategy statement— just as it’s easier to understand a fox dissing some grapes than an abstract commentary about the human psyche.

Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways. Concreteness helps us avoid these problems. This is perhaps the most important lesson that Aesop can teach us.

For some people in the study, making the economics work proved relatively easy, whereas for others it proved much more difficult. Family wealth served as a significant means to pursue a hedgehog in only six of the 34 lives we studied, whereas in ten of 34 cases people endured at least one significant phase of scarcity while in pursuit of a hedgehog. Yet whether easy or difficult (or somewhere in between), they committed to focus their inner fire in line with their encodings and they figured out how to make the economics work.

One of the biggest mistakes that I see people make is they don’t want to learn from someone who has a character blemish or a worldview that doesn’t align with theirs. Seneca captured the right approach when he said in On the Tranquility of the Mind, “I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.” Or, as Cato the Elder put it, “Be careful not to rashly refuse to learn from others.” Don’t throw away the apple because of a bruise on the skin.

Either a nation faces its uncomfortable truths, or it is overwhelmed by them; for there is a prophetic consequence in the perpetuation of lies, just as there is an unavoidable fate for all those who refuse to see.

There are some things on earth that are stronger than death. One of these is the eternal human quest for justice; a people cannot live without it, and in due course they will be prepared to die to make it possible for their children.

Fables are made of this.