…yes, yield to that temptation to do sum’thing different!…

…possibly mega-boring tale coming up… pass on by if yeez wish… I won’t mind… but I want to write and share this one anyway… if just to remind myself… 32 years ago, in 1986, my employers of the time felt the need to send me away to get my business brain recalibrated… they chose the Harvard Graduate School of Business – Advanced Management Program in Boston for me…

…it’s like a two-year intensive graduate course condensed into only four months… I was the second youngest (a callow 38 years old) in the class of 160 high-powered executives from all over the planet… mostly from the C-suite… we were each allocated a small ‘can’ bedroom, so small and cramped, I felt I had unpacked my suitcase and packed the room… the case study method had us pumping 3 case studies per day, visited-on in three different ways… in our own ‘can’ groups of eight people as a team at night… the second iteration was the following morning after breakfast, with a different set of eight participants, then thirdly, into the class auditorium session with the professors and the full class… it was a guerrilla course in business and management learning…

…however, of all the great things I did learn, the best piece of wisdom I picked up came from one of the Human Resource professor’s modules… he told the assembled executives, ‘We at Harvard track you ladies and gentlemen after you leave this course, and we can tell you that traditionally, within only two years of returning to your companies and businesses, fully two-thirds of you (over 100) will have changed either your job or your spouse/living partner… we know that our psychology studies show that phenomenon is down to this — most of you have been triple-A performers most of your lives in your careers, hence your presence here at Harvard, chosen by your employers… once you start to re-experience academia and all the things you’ve missed in your lives, the thought comes in, “Is what I’ve achieved to date only/all that my life has been about until now?”, and you search for a change… something different… we have a recommended antidote for you all… when you go back to your other-world routine, try to find each year something totally unrelated to your work, and get as intense about that as you have been about your professional careers.’… his words resonated with me, and when I returned to Hong Kong where I lived at the  time, I decided to learn how to swim, having been scared of being in water all my life up until then…

…I rang the local British Naval base (this was well before the pre-1997 handover to China)… they had a female swimming instructress who came to my block of flats, where we had a swimming pool beside the building… amazingly, within twenty minutes, she had me overcome my fear of being in the water and had me swimming properly in just the first lesson… I took further four courses of six lessons each with her, and it was the best summer of my life… I have not been able to maintain a new pursuit every year, but I’ve done many… professional lessons to enhance my existing singing skills… Spanish guitar, electric guitar…

…languages — Cantonese, Tagalog, Arabic  to add to my French, Gaelic, and  (halting) English…

…and ten years ago, along came the desire to write a novel… the rest is history in that respect… I have learned to publish on Auntie Amazon Kindle… I have become a blogger… I’ve put some of my poetry into print from decades ago up until the modern era… there are still some things on my To-Do-List … learning to play piano…

…black-and-white photography… (I’ve still never owned a camera, apart from the mobile phone stuff which takes me eons to understand how to take pictures of my knee and toes when I don’t know I’m doing it… and through all of this journey, I truly believe that doing these things has made my business life much more productive and enjoyable… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!

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