The Moral of Wile E. Coyote

McKinley Valentine
2 min readMay 2, 2020

You’re a coyote, use your dang teeth, stop trying to do things the hard way

So the point about Wile E. Coyote is he has some pretty good tools for catching prey, namely: teeth, claws etc, and teaming up with badgers (this is true, coyotes are better at chasing and badgers better at digging so they often hunt together).

But he doesn’t do any of that, instead he tries all these elaborate ruses that he’s terrible at, that he’s totally unsuited to, and he never gets to eat.

There’s a very strong and logical idea that you should work on your weakest points, but I’ve been editing a bunch of business / thought leadership type articles for a finance firm, and they’re really pushing the idea that you should put all your resources into your strengths (what they would call your ‘distinctive capabilities’) and only improve your weaknesses to the bare minimum needed to get by.

Like, if you have poor organisation skills, don’t bother going to some three-day project management seminar, just make sure you’re meeting deadlines and showing up on time and call it good. Spend those three days on the skills that distinguish you.

It made me think of one of Zadie Smith’s 10 Rules for Writing:

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McKinley Valentine

Full-time writer based in Melbourne, Australia. I make cult-hit newsletter The Whippet: Science, history, weirdness, and non-cliched advice | thewhippet.org