Navigate slide 28, How to succeed, ex 9a

Remember that you can choose to resist temptation if you want to.

Just because you couldn’t stop to stop yourself yesterday, doesn’t mean you can never do it.

Think about something else. If you succeed in turning your attention away from the chocolate for a while, you may forget about it altogether.

Stop for a minute. Perhaps you felt you couldn’t spare the time to go for a run yesterday? But if you stopped and really thought about it, you’d see it was much more important than many of the things you didn’t manage to do.

Think ahead. Plan for the future and you will succeed in achieving your goals.

Never buy things on impulse. Go home and think about it. If you really like it, you will still be able to buy it tomorrow, or next week.

Spend time with people who are able to resist temptation themselves. Pick up some valuable lessons by observing someone whose patience you admire.

Navigate slide 29 Faking it, Review Last night’s TV.

Last night’s TV

The best thing on TV last night was Faking it. It takes someone with no experience in a particular job and sends them to live and train with an expert for four weeks. They then have to take part in a contest against professionals, and a panel of expert judges decides which participant is the ‘faker’. At the beginning of the programme, we met Ed working in a fast food van in all weathers, selling chips and burgers. In this job he didn’t need to do much apart from arrive at work on time and be reasonably pleasant to people. All this changed as he had to learn how not to be pleasant to people as a head chef in a top London restaurant.

According to Ed’s teacher, one of London’s top chefs, to succeed as a chef you must have a passion for food, the ability to run a team, confidence, work to very precise times, and be able to cook.

So, could Ed cook? He explained his technique was to ‘wait until the burger went brown on both sides’; he didn’t have to do much more. To test his skills, his teacher asked him to cook the food in his fridge, telling Ed he could prepare it any way he wanted. The results were not good. Even the vegetables were overcooked, as Ed didn’t realize that he didn’t need to boil carrots for an hour or more.

But Ed’s biggest problem was that he hated telling people what to do. As the top chef explained to Ed, ‘he couldn’t be a head chef and be nice’. Ed was shocked to realize that he couldn’t say please and thank you all the time if he wanted the team to respect him. He also had to learn how to walk and stand more confidently.

Amazingly, after four weeks of hard work and quite a few problems, none of the judges realized that Ed was a complete beginner. In fact, one offered him a job as a chef.