Consciousness, awareness, deliberateness of action.

“Hard times will always reveal true friends.” Depending on our current state, of being in a position to offer or require the trappings of friendship, this remark will be either a comfort or a challenge.

Take the well-known motivational formula “high-achieving people become happy” and invert it: “Happy people become high achievers”.

This is more than just playing with words.  It makes a deliberate contrast to the increasingly held view, which is seeping into the collective consciousness of many company directors, school leaders, even amateur* sports coaches. This holds that success, or at least the ability to satisfy the arbitrarily imposed measurements thereof, is the be-all and end-all – the thing that brings happiness to our beleaguered, over-examined, over-stretched, force-fed pupils.

*It goes without saying that professional sports people are in it to win it, and that no other success criteria count for anything, beyond winning matches.For the last twenty years there has been a subject on the British school curriculum called PSHE. Personal, Social, Health Education. The entire premise of teaching PSHE is born out of a desire to see our children developing their sense of certainty about themselves; increasing their emotional intelligence quotient; raising their level of consciousness of self (rather than self-consciousness) and mindfulness; becoming “happier”. Contrary to the blunt, bludgeoning instrument of the afore-implied league tables, context, background and an individual’s realistic expectations must be taken into consideration.

Many of our authors provide a strong message: one’s best might not necessarily be anything to do with a set of arbitrarily imposed criteria, or with anyone else’s best, for that matter. This does not need to limit our expectations or squash them. On the contrary! It should encourage us to think that we are free-willed individuals who must treat every day as a way of discovering who we are, how we learn, what our life path might conceivably be, or rather, what we may dare to make it into.  “Learning how to fail” is an incredibly empowering lesson.

Whether our authors are writing form the point of view of someone who has been to the depths of despair and pulled through, or has successfully completed an incredible, heroic expedition, we like to think that a common thread running through Eye Books is the recognition that ordinary people can indeed do extraordinary things.