Why do lottery winners eventually lose all their winnings?:Old dogs never learn new tricks? And old habits die hard?

…And as Max asked me last week, why did I come back racing straight into A grade instead of starting off with his F graders?

The cycling veterans will tell you that you dress in layers on the frigid winter mornings to keep warm and you strip off progressively as you warm up. They will also tell you that you lay down a foundation of training – layer by layer in order to get you up to your peak performance level.

The secret is in the layers. Build up enough layers of fitness and it will take a lot of peeling off to reduce you to the physical performance level of a couch potato. There is a theory that it takes a month for a human to form a habit. It is thought that those 30 layers get so sticky that it does not unravel – thereby forming a habit. And for lottery winners, all that extra money is just an icing layer. It all falls off when given a good shake and they are back to where they started.

You hear of big business structuring themselves to minimise their tax obligations. This is done by adding layers of entities upon each other which allows for accounts to be buried. The silicon chip that has driven the last few years of technology is based on the ability to build layers of ultra-thin silicon wafers on top of each other. Girls put their layers of makeup on in the mornings – then make sure that it stays on all day and night. It offers some sort of protective cocoon.

In fact, everything is so layered that we never get to know where it all starts. It is like the Russians in Siberia who play on the frozen lakes and simply forget that it all started with water.  The same with ‘Chinese Whispers’, where the final message morphs into something that bears no resemblance to the original.

Is that crack on my carbon bicycle frame only as deep as the layers of finishing paint, or does it extend through all the 3K weave? We only see the crack because of the paint layer – but somehow cracked paint worry us more than a fault in the inner layer of the carbon weave. Just like girls will take so long to decide what to wear – not getting the fact that the guys just want to be able to have X-ray vision so that they can see through all those layers to get to what is underneath!

Just remember that everything in life is layered for effect. You can be content with the superficial top layer, or you may want to peel some of that mask off to settle on something closer to the core truth. The brave ones will try to peel all the layers off to find the nucleus. But this will require a supreme effort.

For most of us, just remembering from time to time that “what we see is definitely not all there is”– will be enough to let us enjoy life without the constant worry of scratching the paintwork.