Every book is a journey. Each journey starts from somewhere. Every writer has preconceived notions. These are truisms. The magic happens when the journey changes them and then the writing becomes something special. One part of The Sniper Mind required I find and interview snipers.

In the 1999 sci-fi blockbuster The Matrix, Morpheus talks to Neo about bending the rules of his reality to do seemingly impossible things (like jump across large buildings with a single bound). He says: “You have to let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt, and disbelief. Free your mind.”

Students cramming for exams, managers putting the finishing touches to a major project and writers and journalists chasing tight deadlines battle against the need for sleep, trading what we usually know is mental alertness and efficiency for the need to finish something by a specific time. Worse still, each of them know that the moment the sun breaks in the horizon they shall have to focus their brains, take a deep breath and get through the day functioning like the night before was spent chasing ZZZZZs.

I’ve been receiving a lot of email enquiries about The Sniper Mind. I went into the trouble of grouping and then analyzing the questions that have been coming in and broadly speaking they fall into very specific

Change is truly constant. No business and no person remains the same. Because we are all constantly engaged in a complex dance of evolution as an adaptive response to the changes we feel happening around us it seems strange that we have so many “change management” courses. Even stranger, for people whose entire life is spent living in constant change we seem to be really bad at actually dealing with it.