The engine of human potential

Those with nothing have nothing to lose and only one resource - their drive to thrive.

The engine of human potential revs up and suddenly flair, acumen, sweat and pride moves people to levels of enterprise of which they never thought themselves capable.

This week I talked with people who have lost - not everything - but a considerable amount in the recent economic upheavals. Do they feel liberated in a world turned upside down?

Turns out, the Government was using the distraction of the years of plenty to build into our way of life so many rules and obstacles and dampeners and codes and crimes and forms and bureaucracies and injustices and reasons for not doing anything at all that the human spirit is having a hard time re-asserting itself.

Was there ever a worse confluence of crisis and government?

Spit and polish

I put some paper down this week. How often do we put paper down any more? ("Make sure you put some paper down," shouts your mum, but that was years ago.)

It's only a proper job if you have paper down - that's the rule, isn't it?

I was putting paper down to clean my shoes for the first time in a while. Oh yes, I'd used those sponge pad, liquid polish, shoddy shortcuts for years but that's cheating. I've always felt bad about that.

So, in these credit crunch times, I deployed paper and polish. Oh, and spit. You need to spit to get a proper shine.

With the spit and the paper, it was job well done. It was the 21st century equivalent of dismembering a mammoth you had wrestled into submission an hour before. You needed paper down for that too.