The Dodo Rule and Raising Self-Esteem

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865), the animal characters become drenched in water after a day of swimming at a local lake. One of the characters, a Dodo Bird, decides to arrange a competition to help everyone dry off. Everyone was to run around the lake until they were dry. No one measured how far or how fast each person ran, nor how long, nor which route they took. Later, when they asked the Dodo who had won, he is reported to have pondered this outcome for some time before declaring, “Everybody has won and all must have prizes.”