Babies push themselves to the limit.
Take mine, for example (not literally – I’ve grown moderately fond of her).
At five months old, she can’t crawl, but she wants to. Tries like her life depends on it, grunting and straining as she tries to persuade her knees to propel her forward (even though that’s physically impossible, since her fat belly means her arms and legs are off the ground).
She puts the same effort into walking, though that’s even further off. Give her a book on astrophysics and as long as there are a few pictures, she’ll happy gurgle away and try to turn the pages as she studies it with dribbly intent.
And at bedtime, even though she’s tired and yawning and rubbing her eyes, she doesn’t want to go to sleep. She wants to squeeze a few more drops of life out of the day, see something new, learn something new, do something new.
So what happens to all that get up and go? How come humans start off so driven, so determined, so keen to push the boundaries of what’s possible... and grow out of it as they grow up?
For instance, we’re looking for a graduate or junior copywriter at the moment. A great opportunity for someone to learn the magic of fundraising copywriting. To discover the magical art of persuading an audience to donate to a charity just because they read what you wrote.
Yet some of the prospective candidates have so little drive, they couldn’t even be bothered to check the spelling, punctuation or grammar on their CVs or covering letters. Pretty bad on any CV you'd think, but particularly so for someone who's applying to be a copywriter.
One would-be wordsmith even spelt her own name wrong (at least, she spelt it two different ways on the same document).
On the other hand, we’ve also had one candidate who speaks seven different languages. So maybe there is hope. Maybe there are still a few souls who’ve kept the energy and ambition they had as babies.
Of course, one of the reasons we lose the drive we had as babies may be the fact that we go on to have babies of our own. Take mine, for example (again, not literally).
Before we had Daisy Boo – the easiest, sweetest, most straightforward baby to look after you could wish for – I had the drive to write two books in a year, while doing a pretty demanding job. Now I’m so knackered from a day of entertaining her that I don’t even have the energy to finish this sen
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