Who Moved My Cheese

This very short book is about rethinking our own life in general, about our own approach about how to deal with issues of any kind. Cheese, as mentioned in the book, could symbolize anything dear to a certain individual – money, sound health, loyal friends, great family, and so on.

As human beings, we often tend to overanalyze most of the events in our lives with our “complex brains,” as Spencer Johnson referred to the human brain in his book. Meanwhile, hamsters “keep it simple.” If there is no cheese in the area (Cheese Station) where they are or the cheese doesn’t taste good anymore for whatever reason, hamsters would start looking for it somewhere else, instead of trying to figure out whether that cheese will be delivered to their place again or start complaining about having no cheese for various reasons, as humans would do.

The message that the author aims at sending through “Who Moved My Cheese” is that if your current approach in life doesn’t give you the results that you want, then you should change your approach. Looking for your cheese is the metaphor that he uses in this book.

However, while that book promotes a “go-getter” approach and criticizes any form of whining, it is too simplistic about life, and doesn’t sufficiently address two approaches that are among the main reasons why we exist as a stable society – cost-benefit analysis and game theory. The book does not discuss the rational person theory either. All three lead to analyses that might talk us out of a certain decision

This book should serve the purpose of rethinking our own life, and what we could change in it in order to make it better but we should still remain at least somewhat cautious before we make up our mind.

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