Nothing wrong with borrowing other people’s life guidance principles. There are plenty of others with sufficient intelligence to learn from. You just have to hunt through a lot of haystacks to find them, and there’s a mountain of sifting to do before you’ve found the really usable information. Quite early on, I latched onto ‘the higher the monkey climbs the tree, the more he shows his arse’. I’ve lived my life by that one, as far as I can, consciously. Of course, sometimes circumstance drives you to deviate from your planned path. You raise a family, and at some point it’s going to become obvious that you need more money, so you apply for that promotion, and you find that all it brings, apart from the craved for wages, is misery and stress, and puts you in a place where you are no longer doing the thing you loved in the first place, and your response is to become a grouch in a chair, and if you don’t get out of it at some point, that’s how everybody will remember you. I had to smash up my leg to become somebody else, because I didn’t have the capacity to work out what was wrong, being blinded by habit, unable to see beyond the role I had only taken on against my better judgement. But a bit of distance, a little perspective and it all takes on a different hue. That question the boss asks at staff appraisals about what training you would like to take on to develop your career – it’s not fashionable to answer that you are content to stay at the bottom of the tree. That means you lack ambition, and you get marked down for that. But the bottom of the tree is where the roots are, that’s what makes it all work, the roots carry the life-blood up to the top tips of the branches where somebody else can be buffetted by the wind and the weather and get gnawed by squirrels and shit on by pigeons. So don’t fall for the format of the forms you have to fill in, which direct you to everlasting development. Find your niche, wherever it may be, and stick there, resolutely, because if you step out of it, for sure you will have killed some of the joy in your life. And if, like me, it takes you half your life to come back to this realisation, which you already knew in your youth, then you’d better also consider that now is no longer the time to be climbing trees and showing your arse. Not now it’s all wrinkly and unattractive.