Humans Hem through to Haw

I joined a new startup recently and I was with a lot of good people who are very experienced in what they do and all I wanted to do was learn from them and the way they work as a Corporate Company without Politics but instead shipping more.

To learn more about culture and also to find a new interesting book, I went on to ChatGPT and googled for finding books that were majorly focused on “Change, Jobs, Motive/Perspective to/for Work and Job” etc to find an interesting enough book, that is when I stumbled upon this book called “Who moved my cheese”. For many days, this book had been lying in my Amazon Cart and I finally ordered it a couple of days ago.

I wish to cover the story with my own perspective and what I realized by positioning myself as a mouse within characters of the book in this blogpost.

What is this book about?

The book “Who Moved My Cheese” is based on how people should be dealing with sudden/recurring changes in their lives or even at times in jobs. The book is a 90-page short story that even a small kid can understand, but what I feel is that a kid can only read and understand the story. What makes this book quite special is the post-read thinking you should be doing after reading this book. Thinking after you’ve read this book is very very important because that is when you start questioning your actions why you were not moving on from things and why you never wanted to find the new Cheese.

The book is about 4 Mice Hem, Haw, Sniff, and Scurry who are put into a maze that has cheese at certain points (referred to as Cheese Stations). Hem and Haw are normal mice and not so clever. Whereas Sniff and Scurry are those with a fairly clever mind and they almost understand how to deal with the situations around them and can quickly adapt to any kind of change.

Hem is the mouse who is never at all ready to change or move on and basically does not know what to do when things around him change all of a sudden, whereas Haw is the one who moves towards change after a certain pain point where he has to make a decision of whether to move on or stay in the worst condition he is in.

As humans, I believe all of us are Hem at certain points in life and at the workplace when we are sometimes not ready to accept a change. But humans are moldable vessels, just the difference is that as every vessel is different, the amount of heat/tension every vessel needs to mold itself is different. When I say “Vessel” I am trying to relate this with how a particular individual’s behavior is and when I say “moldable vessel” I am trying to relate this to how adaptive is someone by nature to whatever change is happening with or around them.

In the story, after Haw is all broken with hunger and energy, he starts thinking of how he could get out of this situation because if he does not leave to find new Cheese he will die of starvation, and even if he goes out and does not find a cheese he would die that time as well. He sets his sail out to find new cheese and after a lot of failures, he finds a Cheese Station N where Sniff and Scurry are already eating the cheese and have grown their tummies.

I was Haw at my first job.

I believe a bit in generalism or generalized specialism (I am not very confident about this yet). At my first job as an SDE Intern, I was assigned (or self-assigned) the job of building some modules on an event management platform, after some time and building some broken things I was very disinterested in that project and I wanted to move on from it while passively trying to make regular contributions to it and maintain the website in any other way possible. As I was bored of it, I started finding newer ideas that would challenge me and excite me at the same time. I ended up doing a lot of other tasks that I felt needed to be done and would also challenge me.

I recently read a quote that said “You are not growing, if you’re at the same place as the last year”. Vaguely enough, I misinterpreted this quote when I read it on Twitter first. If I’m not wrong “Place” here relates to a situation/knowledge factor where you are stuck or haven’t updated what you already know. If I’m not wrong, if your workplace is a cheese that has lost its quality, it’s never bad to start a chase/search for a new job where you enjoy and are sane most of the time. This could also be interpreted from the quote.

In the book, Haw is stuck with Hem in their starvation situation for a long time until he realizes that he has to forget the taste of Old cheese and go in search of New Cheese (Opportunities).

Simplicity

This book is very insightful, at every single line you have this sudden click in your brain where the line feels very related. The writer has optimized and has made sure that the book is very simple. He probably knew what he wanted to write, so he just picked up a small and short story and built a brilliant connection maintaining the simplicity of the book.

Lastly, I don’t think we are some particular character from the book, but instead, I believe Haw, Hem, Scurry, and Sniff are within us. Each of them emerges out only at certain moments in the Maze (Life).