Summary Review and Recommendation for
"Who Moved My Cheese", By Spencer Johnson
This is a well written parable representing how change occurs in everyday life and within the story many solid and positive metaphors for dealing with change are presented in an easy to understand and apply context. Sometimes there is no way to avoid change and that is probably a good thing. Given the choice we might just relax and stop chasing new ideas and challenges, this is where the simple genius of the cheese metaphor comes into play. There are four main characters that live traveling a maze in search of cheese to survive. This cheese they are pursuing could represent most anything someone needs in their life; success, material possessions, passions, faith, family, etc. Everyone wants to be happy and this cheese is used to represent attaining your needs and desires. The maze represents a world to explore with the unexpected and maybe even things forgotten around the next corner. I really enjoyed this idea of the unknown because it is a safe representation for our natural fear of the unknown and by choosing a path and searching for our cheese we can (because we must) overcome this simple fear.
I’m probably getting ahead of myself here without first digging a little deeper into the story and the characters. Sniff and Scurry are two mice who live in the maze and obviously they like cheese and search for it daily. They are fast and have a knack for taking action utilizing their natural skill sets to help them find cheese. Hem and Haw are two little people that are (conveniently to the stories plot) very ill equipped to hunt for cheese. They tend to over think there situation and are slow to act, getting up and then returning home later than the mice. While the mice seem matter of fact about the situation Hem and Haw are slightly delusional about their situation and seem genuinely surprised when they find the current store of cheese has been depleted.
“The more important...