Today at the BlackStar Christmas Lunch I had the pleasure of talking to more than 40 committed enthusiastic BlackStars who heard me speak about the Seventh decade I am shortly to enter into. Many people told me I should share the thoughts with a wider audience so here is a precis of that speech:
Where has the time gone, it seems only yesterday that we were celebrating the millenium and we are, in a few days time to slip out of the ‘Noughties’ and start a new decade. It will be the seventh that I have seen.
1959
In 1959 at this time of year I was about 15 months old and being prepared for only my second Christmas, I probably didn’t know much about it, and I probably cried. I doubt I got the presents that I wanted.
1969
10 years later and I was now at the end of my first term of a new school. I’d learned to walk, to read, to write, and had the basics of the sciences and the arts, of language and of sport under my belt. The family was at it’s largest, Father. Mother, Two Sisters and my Grandmother, plus occasional Au Pairs. My Mother’s mother, my grandmother, was a feisty woman born in 1884 and a suffragist who had under her own steam travelled to see Queen Victoria’s funeral, not bad for a 17 year old woman in 1901. Her Husband I’d never really known, a Scottish Lawyer who bred a sense of fair play and justice that was strong in my parents too, and I think in me. I have come to know him through his blogs (yes no mistake in the language) and now own a few of those Journals which he wrote in the 1920′s about his travels with my grandmother, stories he kept up to date as the years flowed by with cuttings and news about the people he had met.
1979
A further 10 years on and I was now in my final year at University, St Andrews, about to graduate with a course including economics and psychology. A university I hadn’t expected to attend, but had indeed followed in the footsteps of my grandmother (Lady Literate of the Arts – 1901 – did I mention she was a big influence?) – and both my Mother and Father. I’d not spent years working out what to study, but enjoyed my time there.
1989
By 1989 I’d been working in the Insurance Industry for around nearly 10 years. I never intended to do that, I’d been a specialist reinsurer and now worked in London for a specialist insurer – a division of an American company. I had a great team around me and we were growing fast, it was a hectic and exciting time. A year earlier I had met my wife, we met and married in just a few months and still share our lives now, 21 years on. That’s been a relationship I could not and would not be without.
1999
Another 10 years slips by and I’m working as the head of Business Risk Management at a major UK bank, organising and preparing for the Y2K projects to finish. Whilst much was done and much seemed a bit of a ‘damp squib’ it was a great success too. That wasn’t (retail) Insurance now, just an Insurance company, the work was different and the team and people were great. At home my Daughter now nearly 5 was turning into a young girl for whom I had another focus and purpose. None of that could have really been predicted in 1989. Change remained the constant.
2009
So, now, another 10 years on, My daughter is an accomplished musician, playing piano, cello, guitar and singing, an academic too and winner of awards for that, she makes us very proud. Here, I now run my own business which is sought out for the skills those years of experience shaped by today’s context bring to its clients. I’d like to thank Thomas and Penny and Glenn for their faith in what I deliver for them, and the Members of Ecademy for their outstanding support and help and challenge. Yet again I see that none of what I now do would have made sense in the context of 10 years ago, yet everything I have done makes sense in the context of today.
And so to another decade…
My point here is that the chances are that whatever we are doing today, and whoever we are doing it with today, we won’t be doing that in 10 years and we won’t be doing it with the people who now share our working life, at least not all of them. We will grow and we will develop and change and our time here, on this earth, moves on and changes us and others. Robert Oppenheimer (he of Nuclear bomb fame) famously said, “The world changes as we walk in it” and each of us through what we do and how we behave and how we affect others, changes the world a little (or a lot) every day. We change people a little (or a lot) by the ways we interact with them. It is through the collective learning of the teams and people that were and are important to me in each (and through each) decade that makes me who I am today, and to all of them I say “thank you”.
But mostly, as I look forward to a new decade, to the next 10 years it is to us, each and everyone of us, that I know, together, can make this the best decade of them all, whether, like me you are entering your seventh, or like Ecademy, their third.
To all of us – I wish you a Happy Christmas and a fantastic New Year, together.
