…nearly thirty years ago, the business group I worked with in the Far East decided my brain needed some retreading… the result was a place in the Advanced Management Program (AMP) at Harvard University Graduate School of Business in Boston… (how’s that for a neat bit of name-dropping, Mabel?)… the AMP is basically a two year advanced business education syllabus crammed into three and half months… there were 160 of us on the program, mostly older, well-established senior executives… to give yeez an idea, I was the second-youngest participant at the tender age of 38… so yeez can p’raps imagine the kind of stressful cramming on the case studies (three per day, each case shared three different times each day with different mixtures of high-powered captains of industry)… exhausting, frightening, and exhilarating all at the same time…
…the faculty numbered some of the finest academic teaching professors on the planet… but the one that made the most impression on this ol ‘Jurassic (then in my pre-Jurassic meta-form) was the guy who taught the human resources’ ‘soft skills’… the hows and wherefores of surviving as a human (heaven forfend, ‘human’?) in the rat race that often constitutes the murky universe of commerce and finance… he highlighted the fact that the majority of the attendees had probably spent the major part of their working careers excelling in the rarefied atmosphere of the corporate world… too often that means the subsuming of family life, of other interests, of friendships…of being part of Life… one helluva cost for far too many… his advice was simple… he said, ’every year, try to get immersed in some activity, however foreign to yeez, that has absolutely NUTHIN to do with yer job… and give that as much attention as yeez give to yer work’… at the time, it made a lot of sense to me, and immediately when I returned home to Hong Kong after the three and a half months, I decided to do something which had scared me all my life… at the age of 38, I learned how to swim… got a proper tutor, and spent three more months acquiring that skill set, the thought of which had terrified me all my life until then… it proved to be one of the best summers I’ve ever had…
…since then, each year I’ve tried to find some new pursuit… many of them with more or less success than others… different languages… guitar playing, Acoustic and Electric … professional singing lessons… six years ago, it was deciding to write my first novel… and since then, more and more of the SOSYAL NETWURK involvement… NUTHIN is too scary now… I seldom seem to have any ‘down time’ and that suits me perfectly… I enjoy keeping what’s left of the grey cells moving up there… maybe a wee thought or three in there for some of yeez?… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…
By Seumas Gallacher/ @seumasgallacher
