I Moved Your Cheese by Deepak Malhotra

Author:Deepak Malhotra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2011-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

I MOVED YOUR CHEESE

“Once I learned the language of people, I spent much of my time studying them. I also read what they wrote about the maze. I learned how they designed it and for what purpose. I learned why they moved the cheese and how they decided where to move it. Many of the questions I had asked since childhood were answered. I discovered why there are so many useless paths in the maze, and why there are so many different ways to get to the same place.

“I learned all of this, and it explained why things work the way they do in the maze. But it did not justify it. In fact, there was no justice in it whatsoever. Those who had designed the maze had done so for their own benefit and for their own purposes. But they did not live in the maze. We did. I came to understand the why, but I was unwilling to accept it.

“So I decided to do something about it.

“Discovering how to do it took only a few weeks. Each night, the administrators who designed our maze left instructions for their assistants. In the morning, the assistants read the instructions and made the appropriate changes to the maze. They then studied the mice all afternoon and noted their observations in a logbook. In the evening, the administrators read the data provided by their assistants and decided on the instructions for the following day. The same cycle repeated every day. It was all very mundane.

“That’s when I stepped in.

“I started to change what the administrators described in their instructions, and then what the assistants noted in their logbook. In this way, I was able to affect the changes that were made in the maze. I started out slowly. In the beginning, I made only small changes—moving one wall at a time, usually in a remote passage of the maze. Eventually, I became bolder. I redesigned the maze almost completely. The maze is now more efficient and its design more inspiring. There is now more cheese in the maze, although it is not always easier to find.

“Why do this? What was my purpose? To help mice see the maze for what it is. To give them more time to evaluate the paths they are taking. To encourage them to think. To motivate them to discover what their happiness really depends on. To encourage them to discover their own purpose.

“But do you see the irony? Try as I may to help other mice, the result is still a maze that is based on my preferences and that serves my purpose—not theirs. The mice in the maze are no freer today than they were before! The new maze is better than the old maze, but the mice are still subject to the rules of others.

“But this does not have to be.

“If a single mouse decided, on her own, that she was no longer going to blindly pursue cheese, she would be free. I would have no control over her.

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