I was recently in Seattle for work and on my day off I visited the commercial Mecca of coffee: Starbuck's original store next to Pike Place Market. I arrived mid-afternoon and the queue was huge, spilling out of the door and at least two blocks long. Outside was an old guy picking on a banjo. The smell of the freshly roasted coffee mixed with the other smells of the market was intoxicating. As the queue moved forward and as I got closer to the store, I began to feel a growing sense of anxiety. You see, I'm not a coffee connoisseur; I love coffee but I drink it black, no sugar: simple. As I tuned into the conversations around me I heard people discussing what they were going to have from this historic shop. I had no idea what they were talking about, “Quad venti half caf breve no foam with whip two splenda stirred skinny three pump peppermint mocha.”

Seriously?

What happened to having a simple cup of…coffee?

We are born simple; we are instinctive and gloriously uncomplicated; primal. Our needs are to be nourished and nurtured. As we spring miraculously to life, we know nothing.

Yet when you imagine the complexity of those first few days, weeks and months, it is truly mind-blowing. We have to make sense of everything and most of us learn at an incredible rate; from body language to vocal intonation, facial expressions, sounds, sights, smells. Later we learn to walk and talk. Successful or what? We are amazing.

I have spent most of my adult life hanging out with children; I have two of my own and did, for over 15 years, have the privilege of teaching in schools filled with young people between the ages of three and 11.

Over the last ten years or so I have spent much of my time in the “adult world”, in some pretty huge organizations, businesses and sports teams. When I first left the world of schooling, I found them to be daunting and quite scary places. I was filled with a sense of inadequacy; an imposter syndrome I guess. I was like an infant, suddenly born into the world outside the protective womb of the classroom and playground gates. A world filled with noises and behaviours that seemed, on the surface, to be alien. For a while I worried about my own sanity and sense of perspective, wondering if I was just better off in the company of young, small people. Then I started to ask different kinds of questions. I started to explore how much of what we create around us, as adults, actually helps as we go about our lives and how much of it weighs us down. How peer pressure, the perceptions of intelligence and hierarchies influence the way we see ourselves, our potential and the world around us.

I have been fascinated by the perception of success and, more importantly, the belief that it must somehow be complex and only attainable for a rare, superhuman few.

Simplicity seems to be the catchword of the post-financial crash era. The crisis that at the start of this millennium seemed to have forced people to come up for air, breathe and take a meerkat-style look around them before many went back to staring at their feet, consigned to the belief that they had better stick to what they know and do. I want us to take the idea of simple thinking seriously.

To a young child, success is getting fed when you are hungry, having your nappy changed when it's soiled and learning to shuffle over to that big object you've been curious about on the other side of the living room. Success becomes building a tower of blocks that falls over and in so doing makes people laugh, and then building one that stands up, or painting a picture that was most fun in the making and that is now displayed proudly on the door of the family refrigerator. It was easy then, we just got on and did stuff; we didn't know that we couldn't or that we shouldn't. We didn't know that we couldn't paint as well as Jenny down the road or Picasso. We didn't know that we couldn't sing as well as Sam next door or Streisand. When we learned to walk, no one had yet told us that we couldn't move as well or as fast as Usain Bolt or as gracefully as Sylvie Guillem. When we began counting the raisins on our plate, who knew that we weren't in the same league as Ada Lovelace or Alan Turing?

Our perceptions of success and of its complexity can hamper our potential to be more, to be better and, most importantly, to be happier. As we grow and evolve, something happens along the way that fills so many with a sense of doubt. I have come across so many people who in their lives feel that a personal sense of inadequacy has led to them never striving to reach their dreams, aspirations or potential. For many years, I was one of them. I went to a top quality school, a school with a fantastic reputation for academic achievement and sporting excellence. Sadly, I was neither overly academic nor particularly sporty. When I was 18, I began my journey into the world feeling a profound sense of “average”. I had not got a great deal of self-esteem. I was average looking, averagely intelligent, ordinary and unremarkable. I was easily intimidated by those around me. It didn't take a lot: the way people spoke, the clothes they wore, the cars they drove, the jobs and lifestyles, the words they used, the people they hung out with. Even now, despite my age, experiences and achievements, I find that I can be intimidated by the success and status of others. Every time I take to the stage, or put pen to paper, I wait for the experts to tell me I am a fraud. New and challenging situations in the most common of environments can send me wobbly.

This is symptomatic of what I want to explore in this book. Both the belief that to really be worthy, you have to know everything and that if you don't, you have no chance.

Let's go back to Starbucks for a minute. Interestingly, the Starbucks story is in itself elegant and simple in its evolution. Founded in 1971 by three friends, former teachers Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl, together with writer Gordon Bowker, Starbucks, named after a character from Moby Dick, was opened to sell high-quality coffee beans and coffee-making equipment. In 1987 the business was sold to former employee and coffee shop owner Howard Shultz, who saw that the way to reinvigorate a slumping coffee market was not to sell the beans and equipment but to sell the drink by the cup. The rest, as they say, is history. He realized that in an increasingly complex and busy world, people wanted gourmet to go. Simple.

That's what this book is. It is personal development to go.

I do not and will not pretend to have all of the answers to your problems; I will not blind you with science, research, facts and figures. I want you to reflect on yourself, who you are, how you work and how complicated you have made your own journey. I want to act as a cleaning agent by provoking your thinking and reflections so that you can ultimately see things more simply, making your version of success more attainable by making the route clearer. Through the book I will share thoughts, stories and reflections of my own and suggest points for reflection and development.

I used to say to my former students that the difference between a dream and an aspiration is that an aspiration has a ladder that will help you climb towards it; a dream is beautiful but always out of reach.

I am going to explore the behaviours and ways of thinking that will help you build your ladder rung by rung. I will take you back to the traits of early childhood and celebrate the primal, instinctive days of awe and wonder, of curiosity, exploration, risk taking and fearlessness; those simple traits that saw us through the greatest moments of development in our lives. I will show you how, by rediscovering them, you can fulfil your potential and experience greater success in your life.

Let's get started.