“Who Moved My Cheese?”…And Why It Does Not Matter

The book I am reviewing today is the first book on change management you must read.

It is very short. It is so short, in fact, that in this article I will combine its review with a deep dive.

The book’s name is Who Moved My Cheese? It is quick, easy to read, somewhat on the nose. Yet at its core, it is quite profound and spot on how we respond to change.

This year brings big changes for many of us—I hope you will find my notes useful.

What’s The Book?

Published in 1998, Who Moved My Cheese? was written by Spencer Johnson, MD—an American physician and a renowned author. You might have heard of his other wildly popular book series, co-authored with Kenneth Blanchard, PhD—The One Minute Manager.

Once upon a time, there lived 2 mice—Sniff and Scurry, and 2 Littlepeople—Hem and Haw. They lived by the Maze where they ran to every day to find their Cheese at the Cheese Station C. They didn’t know nor they cared about who’d put the Cheese out there—all they knew was that the Cheese makes them feel happy and successful.

One day they arrived at the Cheese Station C and found no Cheese.

Sniff and Scurry looked at each other, put on their little sneakers, and immediately scurried away into the Maze looking for new Cheese.

Hem and Haw, however, continued to come back to the Cheese Station C every day in hopes that someone would move the Cheese back.

One day, Haw realized that he needed to break the cycle. He left his friend Hem, who was still in denial over the Cheese lost, and ran into the Maze in search of Cheese. He looked for a long time, drew some important lessons (quite literally—on the wall of the Maze, as he was running through it), and after a few unsuccessful leads, finally found a really big Cheese Station N, full of Cheese that was even better than the Cheese they had at the now empty Cheese Station C.

Most importantly, now Haw knew that he should always be ready to look for New Cheese and he was always prepared for it.

As you can tell, Who Moved My Cheese? is a fable about change.

Like all fables, it is very compact and condensed, with only a few short paragraphs on each page typed in a VERY LARGE FONT. Perhaps, this is why the author (or his editors) included a story around it to stretch the book further: the next day after a high school reunion, a group of former classmates gather for lunch. They start talking about difficulties of change and one of them shares the story about the Maze and the Cheese. Once he finishes, everyone discusses the story and gives multiple examples of how they relate to it.

This part of the book always rubbed me the wrong way (thank you for the food for thought, but I prefer to chew it myself—please and thank you). But since this is my very own deep dive, I’ll dare to share a few conclusions that I drew this year, much in the spirit of Who Moved My Cheese?

Things I’ve Learned About Change [So Far]

1. Change is painful. Even if it is anticipated. Even if you wanted things to change. Even if everything worked out for the best and whatever happened turned out to be a blessing in disguise. There is always something you have to let go of. Sometimes it is something that you really loved (like the job I had before the layoff) but often it is something small and almost invisible that you didn’t notice until it was gone. Like the radio station you used to listen to every morning in your home city that you so wanted to leave one day. Or the ocean that was 5 minutes away by foot, even though if you had stayed in that apartment forever, you would have to commute to work 2 hours one way. Something always goes away and it might hurt more than you expect.
2. Change hits the hardest when you keep choosing your comfort zone. My wise former boss once said that sometimes we don’t want to change because we feel comfortable in hurtful situations because this is just what we know and what we are used to. But then life happens and somehow we are always pushed out of our comfort zone. The crucial difference lies in what pushed us out of it—our own choices or something-that-just-happened-to-us. And don’t get me wrong—sometimes things are completely out of our control, and this is a different story. But I see it again and again, in others and myself—when we choose our comfort zone over and over, life will over-correct us with the change that will shake us way more just because we will not be ready for it. A relationship that has been deteriorating for a while yet a break-up comes as a devastating blow. Continuous stress, poor sleep, and high blood pressure ignored for many years—yet a heart attack is the only wake up call. If you stop noticing small signs, one day you might come back to your Cheese Station C and find out that all the Cheese is gone.
3. It doesn’t matter who moved your cheese. There is a fine line between grieving the loss of something and developing a victim mentality. I guess it’s a time test. At some point, how dare they do this to ME? should transform into Anyway, now what? Sniff and Scurry from the Cheese story went past the loss quite quickly but they are mice. Hem and Haw were a much more realistic example—they took a long time to process their grievances. Though eventually Haw moved on but Hem didn’t. There is another facet to this. Just recently one of my friends said about the job she hates, “At least it’s the devil you know.” A peculiar belief hides within: the other place is also a devil. What’s good is it to change if the other one might be worse? Placing the blame on someone out there who might take, will take, or already took our Cheese away from us deprives us of our agency, our own strength, and resourcefulness. Eventually, it deprives us of the Cheese we could find ourselves, if only we took some action.
4. Change starts within us.

"He [Haw] had to admit that the biggest inhibitor to change lies within yourself, and that nothing gets better until you change.”—Who Moved My Cheese?

It looks like for us to be adaptable and embrace change rather than succumb to it, we must always be ready to change. It takes a certain mindset that goes beyond open-mindedness or natural curiosity. It takes certain selflessness—willingness to listen, to accept harsh truths (about life but also—yourself), to make sacrifices, and to let go—both of the past that you are losing and the future that will no longer be as you thought it would be.

5. To embrace change, you need to let it go.

And this is the final lesson (at least for me). Everything that I noted above: comfort zone, old habits, old mindset, someone else to put the blame on (even if this is yourself), your past, your idea of the future that will never be. And also of all those old conflicts you will not resolve, someone else’s opinions that you will never change, something that you didn’t have a chance to do, and something that you will never be doing again. Let go of the fear, doubt, and someone else’s ideas of how things should have been. At some point, you will need to go back to the Maze and start looking for the New Cheese. Or, as Spenser Johnson put it—

"The Quicker You let go of old cheese, the sooner you find new cheese.”—Who Moved My Cheese?

Useful Links:

• My article on the hardship of change – Deep Dive into “Management Of The Absurd”
• My former colleague Cameron C. Duncan wrote a book on change management with some great tips on Navigating Change (Amazon link)
• To purchase?Who Moved My Cheese??on Amazon:?link

Next week we will conclude our combined review and deep dive into the books by Spencer Johnson, MD, with The Present: The Gift That Makes You Happier and More Successful at Work and in Life, Today! I will see you then!