protective womb of the classroom and playground gates. A world filled with noises and behaviours that seemed, on the surface, to be alien. For a while I worried about my own sanity and sense of perspective, wondering if I was just better off in the company of young, small people. Then I started to ask different kinds of questions. I started to explore how much of what we create around us, as adults, actually helps as we go about our lives and how much of it weighs us down. How peer pressure, the perceptions of intelligence and hierarchies influence the way we see ourselves, our potential and the world around us.
I have been fascinated by the perception of success and, more importantly, the belief that it must somehow be complex and only attainable for a rare, superhuman few.
Simplicity seems to be the catchword of the post-financial crash era. The crisis that at the start of this millennium seemed to have forced people to come up for air, breathe and take a meerkat-style look around them before many went back to staring at their feet, consigned to the belief that they had better stick to what they know and do. I want us to take the idea of simple thinking seriously.
To a young child, success is getting fed when you are hungry, having your nappy changed when it's soiled and learning to shuffle over to that big object you've been curious about on the other side of the living room. Success becomes building a tower of blocks that falls over and in so doing makes people laugh, and then building one that stands up, or painting a picture that was most fun in the making and that is now displayed proudly on the door of the family refrigerator. It was easy then, we just got on and did stuff; we didn't know that we couldn't or that we shouldn't. We didn't know that we couldn't paint as well as Jenny down the road or Picasso. We didn't know that we couldn't sing as well as Sam next door or Streisand. When we learned to walk, no one had yet told us that we couldn't move as well or as fast as Usain Bolt or as gracefully as Sylvie Guillem. When we began counting the raisins on our plate, who knew that we weren't in the same league as Ada Lovelace or Alan Turing?
Our perceptions of success and of its complexity can hamper our potential to be more, to be better and, most importantly, to be happier. As we grow and evolve, something happens along the way that fills so many with a sense of doubt. I have come across so many people who in their lives feel that a personal sense of inadequacy has led to them never striving to reach their dreams, aspirations or potential. For many years, I was one of them. I went to a top quality school, a school with a fantastic reputation for academic achievement and sporting excellence. Sadly, I was neither overly academic nor particularly sporty. When I was 18, I began my journey into the world feeling a profound sense of “average”. I had not got a great deal of self-esteem. I was average looking, averagely intelligent, ordinary and unremarkable. I was easily intimidated by those around me. It didn't take a lot: the way people spoke, the clothes they wore, the cars they drove, the jobs and lifestyles, the words they used, the people they hung out with. Even now, despite my age, experiences and achievements, I find that I can be intimidated by the success and status of others. Every time I take to the stage, or put pen to paper, I wait for the experts to tell me I am a fraud. New and challenging situations in the most common of environments can send me wobbly.
This is symptomatic of what I want to explore in this book. Both the belief that to really be worthy, you have to know everything and that if you don't, you have no chance.
Let's go back to Starbucks for a minute. Interestingly, the Starbucks story is in itself elegant and simple in its evolution. Founded in 1971 by three friends, former teachers Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl, together with writer Gordon Bowker, Starbucks, named after a character from Moby Dick, was opened to sell high-quality coffee beans and coffee-making equipment. In 1987 the business was sold to former employee and coffee shop owner Howard Shultz, who saw that the way to reinvigorate a slumping coffee market was not to sell the beans and equipment but to sell the drink by the cup. The rest, as they say, is history. He realized that in an increasingly complex and busy world, people wanted gourmet to go. Simple.
That's what this book is. It is personal development to go.
I do not and will not pretend to have all of the answers to your problems; I will not blind you with science, research, facts and figures. I want you to reflect on yourself, who you are, how you work and how complicated you have made your own journey. I want to act as a cleaning agent by provoking your thinking and reflections so that you can ultimately see things more simply, making your version of success more attainable by making the route clearer. Through the book I will share thoughts, stories and reflections of my own and suggest points for reflection and development.
I used to say to my former students that the difference between a dream and an aspiration is that an aspiration has a ladder that will help you climb towards it; a dream is beautiful but always out of reach.
I am going to explore the behaviours and ways of thinking that will help you build your ladder rung by rung. I will take you back to the traits of early childhood and celebrate the primal, instinctive days of awe and wonder, of curiosity, exploration, risk taking and fearlessness; those simple traits that saw us through the greatest moments of development in our lives. I will show you how, by rediscovering them, you can fulfil your potential and experience greater success in your life.
Let's get started.
1
The Child
We are trying to be a more innovative and inclusive organization,” I was told recently by a major technology company CEO. “We have smart people working for us, really smart people but whenever we talk about simplifying our systems so that we can be flexible, more responsive or more creative, people just ask endless questions. What do we do?”
My answer may appear glib, almost flippant, but it wasn't.
“Don't employ anyone over five years old!”
When you look at an abstract work of art, a Jackson Pollock or a Picasso, what do you see? Do you look for something specific? A right answer perhaps? Do you cheat and look at the description on the wall or in the guide book?
When a child looks at a painting they either like it or they don't; they'll say, “too many colours, too dark, not enough spots, too many lines or it looks like an evil witch, or I just don't get it!”
The joy of young children is that they don't know that they have to be clever or, more importantly, right! They are just loving being, doing and thinking, asking and saying.
The world is full of the most extraordinary possibilities.
I often ask audiences and groups that I work with to look at paintings and photographs and ask them to tell me what they see. Most say nothing; you can see in their eyes that they have ideas, but most say nothing because they don't want to be wrong or appear daft, they don't want to appear to have failed in front of their friends, peers and colleagues.
When I was a very young child, my maternal grandfather would take me to the Summer Exhibition at The Royal Academy of Art in London; I loved it. We would walk through the galleries looking at paintings, drawings and sculptures. We never bought the guide book because we just wanted to look at the art for ourselves. Some of it we loved, some we found really boring and some, I remember thinking, I could have stared at forever. I didn't know who the artists were or what the medium was that they used, or often what they wanted to convey.
At that age I loved painting and drawing; I could do it for hours. I remember a peculiar little daytime television programme called Paint Along with Nancy that I used to watch whenever I had a chance. It was a simple, step-by-step guide to painting landscapes and still lifes; I loved it.
It turns out that one or two of my teachers thought I was quite good at art,
