StartupCafe

I briefly touched on attitudes and responses towards change in an earlier post which is the reason for this quick post. I stumbled across a book at a charity shop recently. It’s about four characters: Sniff, Scurry, Hem and Haw. The first two are mice; the last two are littlepeople. The book is about their relationship to change.

Who Moved My Cheese, written by Spencer Johnson, is a well known book and has been out for a while. Though it sneakily jumped off the shelf and into my small hands only recently, I had heard about it much earlier but not gotten around to reading it. You’ll be able to fully devour it in your lunch hour…it’s short, simple and easy to read – written like a small kid’s story.

In a nutshell it is about those four characters, cheese and a maze. Cheese can represent anything you like…money, customers, love, and so on. The maze is where you look for your cheese. The four characters reflect aspects of yourself in relation to change.

The insights can be applied to both your professional and personal life. There’s no need to take it too seriously and tear the book apart as some silly reviewers have done. Like I said, it’s a very simple book and a bit of fun. Being able to identify with one of the four characters may help focus your mind and give you some perspective during those occasions when you happen to be lost in the complexities of your situation.

I use it as a simple and humourous tool to enable myself to take appropriate action / adopt a healthy perspective whenever I find myself on the brink of stamping my foot and crying ‘but it’s not fair’!

I’m happy to share my copy; the next time I’m up in Edinburgh and you catch me at an event, feel free to tap me on the shoulder and ask to borrow it  🙂