Self-Help Review 10: Who Moved My Cheese?

Self-Help Review:
Who Moved My Cheese?
1998
By Spencer Johnson, M.D.

I have noticed during the past couple of months that Self-Help and Success literature tend to follow certain formulas. One thing that nearly every Self-Help book I've ever read has done is tell little stories, usually from the lives of great or successful people, pick out the specifics of how these people succeeded, then give you the distilled wisdom from these stories. Even the highly technical "Feeling Good" is loaded with stories, and I am going to state right here that I understand the value in them. A dry tip is completely worthless unless you spice it up with an example, and the better a story is the more valuable the book is to your own success. However, as the final blurb in the first Spiderman comic once said, "With great power comes great responsibility," and if you're going to make a point with a story, it better damn well be a GOOD story. The trap that a lot of Self-Help books fall into is that they are written by people who are unable to tell a halfway decent story, and you can almost hear their ligaments tear from how far they have to stretch a metaphor.

I mention this because there is some great advice in Spencer Johnson's book, "Who Moved My Cheese?" The problem lies in the fact that this advice is dressed up in one of the lamest stories I have ever read in my entire life, and as my friends know, I do A LOT of reading. The story is all about dealing with change, and it involves four characters, two of them are mice and two are "littlepeople." The mice are named "Sniff" and "Scurry," and one of them sniffs out changes and the other scurries without hesitation. The littlepeople are named "Hem" and "Haw," and one of them hates change and wants things to stay as they are, and the other, um, laughs. The live in a maze, and everyday they go through it, trying to find cheese. One day they all somehow stumble into "Cheese Station C," which contains a shitload of cheese. Both the mice and the littlepeople eat the cheese, but the littlepeople decide to move their homes closer to the cheese, and begin to see it as their cheese. They start slowing down, and go about life assuming that the cheese is going to be there forever.

All this time they ignore the fact that the cheese is getting smaller, and one day, when they go to Cheese Station C, they discover that the cheese is gone. The mice take off into the maze and begin a search for new cheese, but the littlepeople stay in Cheese Station C and bitch about how shitty their life is, because some inconsiderate prick moved their cheese. They sit and wait for it to come back, and after awhile Haw begins to wonder if maybe they should go back into the maze to look for more cheese. Hem argues violently with Haw, because he is sure that the cheese will come back. After several pages of the littlepeople feeling hungry and sad, Haw starts to laugh at their misfortune, and decides "It's MAZE time!" and goes back into the maze to search for new cheese.

To make a short story shorter, he finds Cheese Station N, which is where the mice have been kicking it for awhile now. The cheese at this station is even bigger than they had at Cheese Station C, and Haw says "Hooray for change!" Will Hem ever get off his ass and find Cheese Station N??? The book leaves us wondering about that, but I assume that Hem stayed at the station and ended up writhing on the floor, his stomach shriveling up into a hardened ball until he died in snarling fits of dry, bloody vomiting.

I was unsatisfied with the conclusion of this short story, and I wondered what happened next. From the evidence I got in this story, I assume that Hem and Haw were gay lovers, and that Haw quickly got over the loss of his long-time romantic partner, since change was now his "thing". Eventually a woman named "Hee" stumbles into the station, and Haw decides to take her as a replacement, since he is now addicted to change. He tries to fuck Hee in the ass, since he is used to having anal with Hem, but Hee guides Haw's prick into her vagina, and after ejaculating inside of her she becomes pregnant. They have a baby boy and name him "Hum." Eventually the cheese runs out and the mice leave again. Haw, in love with change, leaves Hee and Hum abandoned at Cheese Station N. Years pass, and since they have no food Hee begins to slice off pieces of her own flesh to feed Hum a little while longer until Haw comes home. After Hee dies of starvation Hum cannibalizes her, then dies two months later.

Haw finds Cheese Station Q along with the mice, and because change is now his driving passion in life he decides to give up human pussy and takes it upon himself to start fucking the mice. The mice happen to be girl mice, and they give birth to mutant micepeople, who scream a garbled combination of English and mouse-talk. Horrified with his offspring, Haw murders the two micepeople and then takes his own life after realizing what he has done. The mice, being mice, are indifferent.

The "Cheese" story is wrapped around another story, this one involving a High School Reunion. The reunion story serves two purposes: One, it has characters talking about how profound the Cheese story is and how much it has changed their lives, and Two, it adds more pages to this book so you don't feel completely gypped by paying $20 for a book that you can read in half an hour. The reunion story is so obviously a second thought by the author that I honestly feel like my time was completely wasted by it, and I wish that I could find Johnson so I could demand back the time that I pissed away reading it.

What are the lessons of this book? Here they are:

Change Happens: They Keep Moving The Cheese.

Anticipate Change: Get Ready For The Cheese To Move.

Monitor Change: Smell The Cheese Often So You Know When It Is Getting Old.

Adapt To Change Quickly: The Quicker You Let Go Of Old Cheese, The Sooner You Can Enjoy New Cheese.

Change: Move With The Cheese.

Enjoy Change!: Savor The Adventure And Enjoy The Taste Of New Cheese!

Be Ready To Change Quickly And Enjoy It Again & Again: They Keep Moving The Cheese.

By the way, every single one of the above lessons appear here exactly as they appeared in the book. There is no possible way that I could make them any more ridiculous or absurd than they already are.

Books like this are why people hate the Self-Help and Success genres. I could sit here for months and try to come up with the lamest Self-Help parody imaginable, and it still couldn't top this book. It's a fucking parody of itself, yet it tells you with a straight face how life-changing it is. The worst thing about it is that the advice in this book is actually good and should be taken to heart. You should be prepared to face change, and you should keep an optimistic view about it. There are sections in the story where it succeeds in sending that point across, but it doesn't change the fact that THIS IS A STUPID STORY, made worse by the way the author continuously pats himself on the back for delivering such powerful lessons to you. It also contains the most shameless marketing I've seen in a book. The characters in the story talk about how everyone needs to hear this story, the writer of the foreword to the book talks about how he gave copies of it to everyone in his business and how you should too, and in the back there's a handy order form so you can easily send away for as many copies of the book as you'd like, so you can give them away as gifts. I guess it worked, though, since this piece of shit was a NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER.

I'd also like to say that the title of this book is possibly the worst part of it. Yes, a character (Hem) actually yells "Who Moved My Cheese?," and both Hem and Haw think that the cheese was actually moved. The reason why the idea of "moving cheese" doesn't work is because the cheese was never moved...it was eaten. The cheese was devoured, and you can't "move with the cheese" if it is being eaten, digested, and shit out. "They" don't keep "moving the cheese," because the other cheese is different, and when you find it, it gets eaten, digested, and shit out, too. It's not the same cheese at all, so it wasn't moved, and if something isn't moved, YOU CAN'T FUCKING MOVE WITH IT.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good fable just as much as the next person. I have heard the "Acres Of Diamonds" story and found it just delightful. I have read many different inspirational stories, and a lot of them are cute, entertaining, and profound. What I don't like is cheap marketing, inflated self-importance, and shitty storytelling, especially if it's all wrapped up in the same package. Johnson knew what he was doing with this book, and some of the characters in his "reunion" story even poke fun at how corny the story is. But some things are unforgivable. Fuck this book, fuck Johnson, and fuck the assholes who made it a bestseller. I'll take The Poky Little Puppy over this steaming pile of rat-shit any day.