The Mixed-Up Chameleon

"I think some of the best children’s stories encapsulate a story that works for everybody. I’m a big fan of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass . There’s a lot of great children’s stories that you can read again and again as an adult. “The moral of the story is to be yourself. And that’s a great moral” This book, in particular, has a great lesson for everybody – that you have to accept who you are. In this case, the chameleon doesn’t like who he is and wants to be another animal so he goes around trying to have the attributes of all the other animals and finally ends up mixed-up and unable to function. I just think it’s brilliant. I still read Johnny children’s books now because he enjoys them for bedtime, but this has always been my favourite to read. You see somebody and you say, ‘I wish I was taller like them,’ or, ‘I wish I had got their sense of style,’ or, ‘I wish I got their sense of humour,’ but not wanting the whole package, just wanting to cherry pick the best, not realising that the world is not like that. You can’t cherry pick, because with one thing comes another. People sometimes are resilient because they’ve had a lot of challenges, or they have a sense of humour because they’ve had a lot of hardship. There is an old Russian phrase: “pain is the grooves into which you pour happiness”. Meaning that the more pain you have, the more capacity you have for happiness. So, when you cherry pick, you don’t cherry pick the balance. You want just the benefit, not the cause – just the effect. People are as they are usually because of the challenges of their daily lives. So, if you to try and be like them, you wouldn’t last long because you’d have to wake up the next day and do it again, and the next. So, the moral of the story is to be yourself. And that’s a great moral. There are always people better or worse than you at something."