A good friend once said how much he disliked the 'greyness' of corporate life, how empty everyone seemed. I asked him how much of himself he took to work. He thought a moment and shrugged. Fair point, he said. This person, who was always at odds with 'corporate', has now moved on from a life spent running company websites to make award-winning short films. And yet, how grey was he to the co-workers he greeted each morning?I went on a business trip recently, meeting my colleague on the train at Wolverhampton as we headed north. We'd not spent much time chatting before that (and probably won't again - at least, not through work.) He was the techie pre-sales engineer and I was the product manager, coming together for a customer visit. We got chatting. He was into photography, and showed me his pictures. His wife had the bug too, and I saw arty night shots of trees illuminated by the two of them as they ran around shining torches in the darkness, while a slow-release shutter rendered the couple invisible. The photos were very good. But even better was the picture it painted in my mind of love and life in action.Something got me thinking today.About all the inspirational people. Not the ones on the big stages, but the ones who aren't really trying to lead anything other than a normal life.About a friend, now gone, who spent his days at home, naked and relaxed, pottering. Brilliant and very much at one with who he was and how he expressed it.About the primary school teacher whose love of Simon & Garfunkel and the canals of England and Wales, through her methods and wonderful eccentricity, ignited in a ten-year old boy two passions that live on decades later.And about the friend who called today, to speak to my wife, but made the happy mistake of asking how I was, whose comments have left me that little bit more certain about things, and whose remark that she'd been listening to 'Let Her Go' by Passenger took me to the album on Spotify. Genius.Does corporate need to be grey? Do we need to strip the personality from our product messaging? I've always struggled with this, and see no reason why it needs to be this way.And with this in mind, my penultimate shout out (in this unashamedly self-indulgent blog) goes to the copy-writer who I've got to know over the last year, whose battle with bland finally seems to be paying off, as the company he writes for finds a more 'human' voice - and in doing so, will perhaps inspire a few more people to look again at the products and services he's writing about.My last shout... to my wife and daughters, whose unflinching belief is a daily inspiration, adding wind to the sails as I work to justify their faith.The list is not exhaustive, and as I've written just these few I'm reminded of all the people I've not included in this short list. Hopefully they know. I guess the point is, be open enough to notice the incidental comments and happenings from which inspiration just might spring, and be bold enough to take a little more of yourself into everything you do.When I was at university, I learnt about a study once carried out on 'luck' by assessing two self-selected samples (unlucky people and lucky people). Count the number of photos in this newspaper, they were told. You'll get money once you're done. And the faster you're done, the more money you'll get. Three pages in, there was a piece of text that gave the number of photos and instructed people to stop immediately and collect their money. Lucky people saw it. Unlucky people didn't, as they stuck to their course and counted the photos, ignoring the text.That's all.Julian