By Joe Byerly
Have you ever actually read the original Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen?
It’s pretty dark. There are no singing crabs, cute blowfish, or happy endings.
It’s a story about a girl who gives up something of great value—and loses everything in the end.
In the original version, the Little Mermaid lives in an underwater kingdom and longs to see the human world. When she turns fifteen, she’s finally allowed to swim to the surface. There, she sees a handsome prince and saves him from drowning during a storm. She falls deeply in love with him—but he never knows it was she who saved him.
Obsessed with joining the human world and being with the prince, the mermaid visits a sea witch, who offers her a deal: she’ll give the mermaid a potion to become human, but at a steep price.
She must give up her voice—the most beautiful in the sea. Every step she takes on human legs will feel like walking on knives. And if she fails to get the prince to fall in love with her, she’ll die and dissolve into sea foam.
Rough conditions, right?
Well, she accepts.
And guess what? The story ends with her as sea foam.
A lot of our fairy tales are like that. A protagonist makes a deal with an unsavory character, under steep conditions, and things don’t turn out the way they hoped. In Rumpelstiltskin, the miller’s daughter is forced to spin straw into gold or be executed. Rumpelstiltskin offers to help—but only in exchange for something valuable each night. First, her necklace. Then, her ring. Finally, he demands her firstborn child. In versions of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, the genie gives exactly what’s asked for, often with terrible consequences. The pattern is the same: power always comes at a cost—and when that cost is our values, we risk losing ourselves entirely.
These aren’t just fairy tales—they’re warnings. And the pattern doesn’t stay on the page. It plays out in real life, over and over again.
In the preface to Rich Cohen’s The Fish That Ate the Whale, a story about Sam Zemurray—a poor Russian immigrant who rose to become a guilt-ridden ruler of the “Banana Republic”—Cohen writes, “We do not yet know you can’t be both powerful and righteous. So we set out again and again, convinced that this time we’ll avoid the mistakes of the previous generations.”
But we rarely do. The deals might look different—titles, influence, access in place of princes, palaces, and golden threads—but the cost is often the same: pieces of ourselves, traded away one compromise at a time.
It’s not always easy to recognize the fairy tale bargains we make in real life.
We take the job that pulls us away from our family because it promises a promotion down the road.
We align ourselves with a leader whose values don’t match our own, believing we can steer things from the inside or that the influence is worth the cost.
We stay quiet instead of speaking up, afraid of losing our seat at the table.
That’s why we must be like Samwise Gamgee, a character in another story about power. In The Lord of the Rings, he’s the one who truly understands the danger of the Ring. Not Gollum. Not Boromir. Not even Frodo. Sam resists not because he’s the strongest or the smartest, but because he knows who he is. He’s grounded. He understands what matters—loyalty, love, humility—and he holds onto those values when everything around him is trying to pull him off course.
So whenever we’re dealing with power, we need to pause and reflect on what we value—and then hold onto it for dear life. It’s the only way we stand a chance at living happily ever after. Because we’re not just negotiating with opportunity—we’re facing the sea witch, bargaining with Rumpelstiltskin, making wishes with the genie. And when we trade our values for power, we lose something far greater in the process.
Joe Byerly is a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel with 20 years of service, including tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and command of a cavalry squadron in Europe. He earned numerous awards, including multiple Legion of Merits, Bronze Stars, the Purple Heart, and General Douglas MacArthur Leadership Award. In 2013, Joe founded From the Green Notebook.
A passionate advocate for self-knowledge through reading and reflection, he authored The Leader’s 90-Day Notebook and co-authored My Green Notebook: “Know Thyself” Before Changing Jobs, a resource for leaders seeking greater self-awareness. If this post resonated with you or sparked any questions, feel free to reach out to him at Joe@fromthegreennotebook.com.
