Don't watch, read or listen to the news this week*. It's all bad and merely confirms that being not so bad is OK. It's not - not when you have the opportunity, right now, to be effortlessly successful and happy.

At the end of the week, you'll be in a better position to decide if it's ever worth reading the news again.

*Unless, obviously, you need to do so for business or work purposes.

I spent forty minutes, last Friday, sitting in sweltering heat, in a traffc jam which was largely made up of cars packed with sweltering children - holiday-makers. It's high season here and the mountain roads are jammed - not because there are too many cars on the roads, it's something far more simple, obvious and easily solved than that.

Between ski season and summer high season, there's a window of twelve or thirteen weeks to get all the necessary road maintenance done. But, to hell with that - why use that window of opportunity when you can mess up people's holidays by doing nothing when the roads are empty and digging the living daylights out of them when half of France has descended on holiday?

You might laugh - that's really all you can do when you're sitting in one of those jams. Or you could marvel at normal people's stupidity. Or, more to the point, you could ask yourself how many windows of opportunity have you not taken.

In chatting with a friend a couple of weeks back, I made the point that, on occasion, I could get up at 6.00am, meditate for five or ten minutes and, by 8.00am find that I've achieved precious little. In the course of our ordinary everyday life, the challenge isn't to get focused, it's to stay focused. All too often, there are a thousand and one things that we can blame for not staying focused: emails to be read, news to catch up on, chores that must be done, things to consider (instead of do)... as I said, there are a thousand and one such things.

All too often, we take pride in being busy and in working long hours but, truth be told, doing things that we do not need to do. We take comfort in filling our day with the urgent and unnecessary, instead of giving priority to our priorities.

I believe, from a psychological perspective, this problem arises from the fact that we are hardwired to take comfort in the mundane or, to put it more bluntly, we are wired to avoid anything that might bring about change... even if that happens to be the change that we long for in our lives. This psychological is, indeed, a handicap but, given that it's a handicap nowhere other than in our own head, it is one we can overcome - easily as it turns out.

The ease is in the steps that need to be taken: regular mental exercising, including meditation, doing small things differently and calling oneself to attention at various times throughout the day - all done against the backdrop of having established, with some degree of subconscious clarity, what it is that I want out of life. The steps are, as I say, easy. The difficulty is that they need to be taken all the time. Commitment and discipline is required. And, as far as I can see, we don't like disciplining ourselves.

There's no easy answer to the question: "How can I discipline myself?" Each of us has to take up that challenge ourselves. The key thing is, though, that, if I find, at 8.00am, that I've had a mental relapse, I stop myself and choose to get back on the horse and start over.