Achieving involves losing - because, once you have achieved something of importance to you, things will have changed and change always involves loss. And we, as ordinary-minded human beings certainly don't like loss and we're actually wired against change. The comfort that we cling to, within our comfort zone, regardless of how uncomfortable our comfort zone might be, is what we've grown up with - the devil we know.

This inbuilt resistance to change has far reaching implications - from the corporate world where major change initiatives result in, well, not major change! - to individual lives where we, at times, are actually afraid to succeed. From our highly-evolved need to remain part of the herd to our highly-developed social identity and the related need to conform - it is often easier to not succeed. Is this why so few people are effortlessly happy and success, whilst so many are stressed and unhappy in their work or their relationships? Is it because we're wired to be unhappy?

As it turns out, we are wired to dwell on the negative. We are wired for negative ruminative thought - the kind of thought that keeps you awake at night or drags you down an alley and mugs you... just while you're trying your best. We're wired to not focus and we're wired to be stressed. We're wired to maintain our lives within very narrow parameters and we're wired to not take what normal people regard as risks. We're wired to survive... which is not quite the same as living.

Why are we so ill-prepared for our own lives? This apparaently flawed wiring is what got us to where we are as the most successful species on planet Earth. It enabled us survive in sufficient numbers to thrive. However, evolutionary processes are notoriously slow - to the point that, in 2015 we're trying to make sense of the world our own ingenuity has created using a brain that hasn't appreciably moved on in over 10,000 years.

On the other hand, whilst evolution might be notoriously slow, the evolution of our own brain is surprisingly quick thanks to the phenomenon of neural plasticity and how, as a result, our brain shapes and structures itself according to how we use it. The big question is, however, how brave and courageous are you to go against your socially learned comfort zone and start using your brain in a way that will enable you to become effortlessly happy and successful?

A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce in Oxford over breakfast. During the course of a presentation on the need to maintain focus during the working day, I mentioned that, all too often, we are only too ready to react to the latest arrival in our email's inbox - regardless of what our priorities might otherwise be at the time. I mentioned the fact that, apparently, in the corporate world, the average response time for an email is less than 30 seconds. So, there you are, "focused", no doubt, on doing just the right thing to enable you achieve today's key objective and someone CCs you (and twenty others) with an ass-covering email to which you feel compelled to respond - dropping your priority, like the proverbial hot potato, in the process.

A member of the audience confirmed that he'd seen the same survey, adding that the average distance travelled by a corporate email was less than ten metres. Now, you might think that people would be amazed at these statistics... not so: another member of the audience told the group:

We all share a large open-plan hot-desk at work. Yesterday morning, as I sat facing my line manager across the desk, I received an email from him: 'Are you in the office today, we need to talk'!