So, this morning, I was careering up the road and I was thinking about target fixation after a near miss with a truck who was coming round a bend on the wrong side of the road. This is probably the number 1 cause of motorcycle accidents. A biker has what bikers refer to as "a moment" - perhaps running into a corner too fast - and panics a little. He sees the carnage that awaits at the side of the road - a ditch or a lamppost perhaps - and looks straight at it thinking "this is gonna hurt".

Target fixation is a universal truth, and it is actually a good thing. The problem is picking the right targets to be fixated on. My perforated best friend (blogs passim) has an incredible target fixation - and goes to some amazing lengths to achieve his objectives. Unfortunately, his objectives always involve scoring heroin. Some of the wheeling-and-dealing talent he has to employ in order to achieve this is impressive indeed.

I once worked on a trading floor up in the City of London, where oil was being traded. People were sitting with two phones - one at each ear - buying something from their left ear and selling it to their right, trying to cram a nice bit of margin into the gap in the middle (am I implying that there was a gap where their brains should have been?). These guys were doing million-dollar trades and were making an absolute fortune for themselves and the company. My job was to make sure that the back-end computer systems were always up, always running every second, and if they were unavailable then I new about it big-time. I was an insect, something to be crushed if I got in the way of their million-dollar trades. These guys would have traded their internal organs if they could have found buyers for them. More specifically, they'd have traded eachothers internal organs - with or without the consent of the 'donor'.

Anyway, it occurred to me that the mentality and the skills were almost exactly the same. Absolute target fixation to the point of being a psychopath, coupled with the wheeling-and-dealing capacity of a room full of Arthur Daleys. One is earning over a million quid a week, the other one trying to accumulate a few quid to score, but it is only the numbers involved that are different. I think that my perforated best friend would do very very well on a trading floor, if given the chance.

Target fixation can be a good thing, if you fix on the right targets. The bike will go wherever you look, so make sure you are looking in the right place.

And that is one thing you can learn from books (blogs passim). You can learn what it is you should be looking for, and therefore what you should be targeting. Once this target is fixed, you will hit it.

Speaking of the parallels between oil traders and perforated friends, it's not always the most talented people who end up doing the jobs needing the most talent. An awful lot of the time, selection is done superficially rather than a thorough investigation of who and who is not the right person.

I get a lot of phone calls from agents, looking to put me into this job or that job. most of them know nothing about what I do, or how I do it, they just look at my job title and see that it is matching a job that they have a vacancy for. A lot of them, once they speak to me, realise that I don't have a university degree and draw the conclusion that I wouldn't be up to doing the job. They have delegated their thinking - hi-viz jacket style (blogs passim) - and do not use their own skill and judgement (assuming they have it). Instead of figuring out for themselves whether or not I have what it takes, they rely on somebody else having made that decision much earlier in my life and 'rubber stamped' me with a university degree.

So, the decisions I took when I was - say - 20 years young than I am now indicate whether or not I am a smart and useful person today. It may well be the case that I didn't get a degree because I am actually quite thick, or that I am lazy, or it may even be the case that I just couldn't afford to go to university and I had to go and earn a living.

It may equally be the case that I was looking at the wrong targets, and I hit exactly what it was I was looking at.

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