
Can you achieve anything you want?
Too often you hear that if you ‘really follow your passion’ or ‘really go for what you want to do’ and ‘believe in yourself,’ you can achieve everything you desire. The person telling the story is often an excellent example. It's a powerful message and we love to hear it; if we want something badly enough, the world is ours. But it annoys me because it is a false promise. I think it’s mean. In the first paragraph of my book The Fearless Monkey I write that “you just have to d

An original piece on clichés
On an average day, reading newspapers, watching the news, hearing commentators, watching films or surfing the net, you come across one cliché after another. A cliché is a phrase, image or idea that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought. Now, what struck me as a parent is that for kids, there is no such thing as clichés. To them everything is new, everything is original. They haven't yet seen how we portray the typical Mafioso, how a greedy business executive acts

Life and Purpose
Individual and Social Organisms 'An entity that continuously adapts to its surroundings', could certainly be the definition of a living organism. It would also make a good strategy for an organisation. There are many similarities between a living organism and an organisation. There is however, a big difference between an individual organism and a social organism. An individual organism - a human being, a dog, a germ - possesses a definable ‘I’; it is a discrete, independent e