I remember being a kid and watching on a black and white TV the Alabama race riots. I remember – even as a kid – wondering how this problem could ever be solved, how this level of hatred could ever be overcome. Fast forward 50 years and there’s a coloured president in the White House. Pretty much anything is possible.

In my teens and twenties, the Iron Curtain was a fixed part of the geography of Europe. It was hard to see how that situation could ever change. Look at the map of Europe now. Germany is reunited, democracies (of various qualities) in almost all of the countries of the former Soviet Union and that country itself a distant memory. And all of that happened in a just a handful of years. Pretty much anything is possible.

In 2000, my company numbered nearly 50 people. When the dot.com bubble burst, much of our business disappeared overnight. Thinking this was a temporary thing, we tried to ride out the storm rather than getting small quickly, which is what we should have done. Bad mistake. As a result, we ended up with a debt of – essentially – $1,000,000. Fast forward to now and we’re debt free, small, profitable and thriving. I’ll say it again – pretty much anything is possible.

Have you ever thought how lucky you are to have been born at this time in the history of the world?

Imagine if you had been born in the Middle Ages or indeed pretty much any time before about the middle of the nineteenth century. If you had, and unless you were lucky enough to have been born into that tiny percentage of the world’s wealthy people, you would have died as you started out – a peasant or a farmer or a miner or a factory worker or a soldier or something similar.

These days, it’s all different. These days, you can do whatever you want. You can become whatever you want to be. You can start out as the child of parents who do whatever for a living and you can end up doing something entirely different that has never been done by any of your family members or ancestors before you. Harold May was a draughtsman at the Ministry of Aviation – his son Brian went on to become guitarist with Queen.

If your parents are not well off, you don’t have to be too – if that’s what you want. In 2008, Warren Buffet, was reckoned by Forbes magazine to be the richest man in the world with a net worth of $62,000,000,000. Buffet was born in 1930. His father was a congressman whose salary at that time would have been $9,000 per annum.

If your family were people who didn’t seek the limelight, you don’t have to be like them – you can put yourself out there – all over the Internet – if you want to. Beyoncé’s father worked for Xerox and her mother owned a hair salon.

Basically – you don’t have to do anything anybody in your family did before – all down through history. You can go and plough your own course. The world is your oyster.

What a privilege. What a blessing.

And there’s another thing. In my lifetime, the idea of moving up the ladder was the accepted thing. I did it myself for a time – until (you might say) I wised up. This was my ladder:

• First in mathematical physics
• Software engineer
• Project manager
• Managing a software group
• Managing a much larger software group
• Set up a subsidiary of a software company

before starting my own thing.

These days you can skip the ladder if you want. You can become the CEO of your own company in the morning, if you’re so inclined. Larry Page is co-founder of Google. This was Larry’s ladder:

• Bachelor of Science
• Master of Science
• Began a PhD
• Co-president of Google

How’s that for jumping several rungs of the ladder rather than laboriously climbing up each one in turn?

So given that you’ve been born at this great time in history and granted this extraordinary opportunity, what are you going to do with it?

The answer – it seems to me – is that you need to aim high. Why shouldn’t you? The opportunity is there and we’re surrounded by evidence that these opportunities can be seized; any mountain climbed and any summit reached.

Aim high. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t. You just need to have confidence in yourself. There is no ceiling, no limit. Or rather, the only ceilings and limits are the ones you set yourself.

How is it that we set these ceilings? While it’s easy to blame your parents, I think they may definitely have something to do with it. My father’s advice to me was to ‘get a good education and then get a good job’. Given where he had come from – leaving an economically depressed Ireland in the 1940s, and straight into World War II where he served in the British Merchant Navy, then returning to a post-war Britain to look for a job – this was probably good advice, as he saw it. I hope my advice to my children has been a bit closer to the mark – ‘Find what you like to do and then see if you can make some money from it’.

But it’s not just our parents. Sometimes we just make assumptions as to how far we can go or how high we can climb or what we can achieve. Or we slide from school or college into a job and then another (more senior, better paying) job and another and another. We take on more and more financial responsibilities – a car, a house, a partner, children – and before we know it we’re far off down a path that we maybe never really intended to travel.

Perhaps – when it comes right down to it – these ceilings are just caused by thoughtlessness – not consciously thinking about or deciding what it is we want to do with the precious life of ours.

So that’s really the thing here. Think about what it is you want to do and aim high. All the later chapters in this book will then work better for you – if you take a more expansive, imaginative approach to the things you do in work and in life. Ask yourself what you would do if you won the lottery – if earning a living was no longer an issue. Ask yourself what you would do if a fairy godmother suddenly appeared and said that you can be/do/become whatever you want.