Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson is a simple parable that reveals profound truths about ‘Change’. An inspiring fun and educational story of four characters, two gnomes, and two mice, who live in a "labyrinth" (maze) with an immense source of ‘Cheese’, and are always looking for some cheese to nourish themselves and live happily. But one morning, their cheese has disappeared. This event will take one by surprise and will be overcome by other brilliantly.
Cheese is a metaphor of what we have in life: a good job, a harmonious relationship of love, money, health and serenity of mind. The Maze is the place to look for what we want: the company in which we work, our family, the community in which we live. The four characters represent a small part of ourselves, the cheese is what we expect of life and the labyrinth, the way to go for it.
Fear of change is present in all of us. We like our old ways and hope that everything will remain in place forever. This book is for those who fear the inevitable changes of life. It's great fun to read and encourages us to reflect on our behaviour with regard to the difficulties and challenges that life presents to us. The characters are faced with unexpected changes, but the way they handle their will to suffer less stress and be more successful at work and in life is well described in this book.
Are you in a moment of your existence that provides for a change? Do you want to change jobs? Every time you happen to think it would be nice to change your lives, but it scares you? You wonder if what you have is just what you want.
All good things were part of the previous situation, and whatever the future holds is fear. Nevertheless, Johnson's message is that, instead of considering the change as the end of something, we must learn to see it's a start. It's something that we all have heard, but often lack the motivation to really believe it. To induce himself to accept reality, one of the gnomes writes this sentence on the wall of the maze: "If you do not change, you risk of extinction" and "who leaves the old road for the new knows what he leaves and does not know what is.
Who Moved My Cheese? is not a manual of behaviour or even a heavy book on psychology that will force your reading to be challenging and tedious. It a book that you can read in a very short time just like a fairy tale which can be read to children while having fun with the adventures of two mice, and two gnomes, living in the maze.
Spencer Johnson talks about simple things simply by using symbolism in which the maze is our life, with its path never linear, and the cheese is what is important to us and makes us live well. The book contains revolutionary ideas but it tells us things we already know, but, at times when we are in a situation where someone or something has moved our cheese, we do not have the clarity to decide.
Of course, not everyone is so, there are those people who see the changes and feel that they are ready to react before events force them to do so, but there are also many who, does not look at the reality, and become slaves of habits and preconceptions and remain mired in compromising situations, while insisting on hope that something, sooner or later, will change.
Then there are those who are fearful who do not have the sensitivity nor the energy and risk being influenced by the likes of others. Some hesitate, limited by fear of looking out into the maze, but which, when stimulated, and with a little courage can finally move and still able to rediscover out in search of their new cheese.
Change is one of the basic factors of existence, having awareness is the key to success. The nature of change is that we never thought that could happen to us, and this denial prevents us from grasping the opportunities at an earlier finding of the cheese, or even move us, before someone else does.
We must accept in our lives a certain amount of risk and adventure, whether we are willing to live this way, the change loses her looks tremendously. Indeed, those who go out intentionally create change because then the world would not like it. What we discover is that one of the gnome fumbles and overcoming our fears makes us free. Paradoxically, those who are constantly in search of safety are tormented by the idea of being able to lose.
The preparedness for change becomes inevitable today in work and personal life. Those who take for granted the existence of a satisfactory peace of mind is unprepared for the inevitable sooner or later, economic transformation, personal and social.
Who Moved My Cheese? can be appreciated both by the manager and the worker. In this book you can find a stimulus to understand our world of work, which has become much more fluid than in the past, a world in which, even when we choose to continue working in the employment of someone, we exercise the mind control. The lesson to be drawn from this book is easy to remember: do you believe in your life there is some "big piece of cheese" meant to last forever?.
