Being as I'm supposed to be revising, I was trying out a simple video game on the computer over the weekend to get my mind off things. You controlled this monkey in a burning jungle that had to jump from treetop to treetop and collect all sorts of fruit in the process. There were also hoops in the air that drifted up and down, and you had to try to get the monkey to jump through these hoops whilst collecting the fruit to get more points.

I had a target score of 100,000 to beat, and the blasted monkey was really difficult to control. After many a frustrating trip into the burning flames, I managed to beat the score probably more by luck than by anything else.

Ahh, I'm a trained monkey jumping through hoops, I thought, what a neat metaphor for a lot of people's lives! This is a brilliant educational game. But what can you do?

Well, I subsequently discovered that instead of jumping right where all the colourful fruits, hoops, and treetops were, if you jumped left into seemingly what looked like more flames, you actually hit the edge of the screen and disappear! After quitting the game, you're told that you've beaten the target score.

Woah.

It got me thinking - if you follow this analogy through it means that you don't really need to play the game, because you might just get to where you want to go by taking a leap of faith and jumping the other way.