Yes, someone, somewhere is moving your cheese.
Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson, M.D. is one of my top three favorite business books – the other two being The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Make the Noise Go Away by Larry Lucas. It is a lesson in change told as a story about characters in a maze – Sniff & Scurry (two mice) and Hem & Haw (two mice-sized humans) and how they each deal with the change created by their pile of cheese disappearing. The mice never stop looking for cheese because they know it won’t last forever and that does not scare them. They act instinctively, not thinking about the past or worries for the future, just focusing on the goal of finding more cheese. Hem & Haw are too complacent and scared of the unknown that they make themselves believe their pile of cheese will last forever and don’t’ look until it’s gone and too late. Then they spend most of their energy focused on what they lost instead of finding new cheese.
I have three takeaways from this book:
LESSON 1: Stop thinking too much about your cheese and start chasing it; or, don’t make stuff so complicated.
LESSON 2: Even the biggest cheese doesn’t last forever, so try to see change coming; or, don’t be complacent.
LESSON 3: Don’t worry, there’s always new cheese to be found; or, don’t let fear paralyze you.
At the end of the book, Sniff, Scurry and Haw are doing pretty good, and the reader is left hopeful that Hem will eventually read “the writing on the wall”. So don’t fret, you’ll find new cheese soon!
“The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates
“Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.” – Confucius
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