[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.The few who had been to HBS were dismissive of it.They mocked its self-importance, the earnestness of the students, the very opposite of British insouciance.All, however, said that the MBA had taught them the language of business.For that they were grateful.So, in August 2001, in a gray, windowless cubicle in an office tower close to Penn Station, I took the GMAT, the standardized test in English and math required for graduate business school.I waited a few moments for a computer to spit out my score: 730 out of 800.The average for Harvard was 700.I could do this.September 11 knocked me off track.Reporting seemed important again.For several weeks, I was pushed to my limits writing and managing a team of other reporters and photographers flown in from London and all jostling to shine on the story.Then one evening, in the middle of it all, I went to a basement dive for drinks with the rest of the British pack in New York.Christmas lights hung all round the room, making everyone’s already booze-swollen faces look that much redder.“Sensational story,” said one, raising his beer bottle.“Never made so much money off a story in my life.” It was the same emotionally indifferent response I heard whenever a big story broke, a political scandal, a celebrity trial, even a terrorist attack killing thousands.The cynicism that once attracted me to journalism was turning me off.Furthermore, the experience of standing beneath the TwinTowers just before their collapse, watching people leap to their deaths, had forced on me the same question it must have forced on millions of others, and it grew louder as the days passed.If everything ended for you right now, would you be happy with the life you have lived? I had never felt the pressure of this question in the same way.For several weeks, I would wake up feeling as if I were being pressed into a corner with a knife at my throat, forced to give an answer.Have you lived the life you should have? Have you done everything you could have? Have you? Have you?As a reward for my work in New York, I was offered the job of Paris bureau chief.Margret, whom I had met eighteen months earlier, and I were married just before we moved.Marriage and Paris distracted me again from thoughts of upending my career.There was a rambunctious presidential election to report on and all of France to discover, and one year after we were married, our first son, Augustus, was born.But the questions kept nagging at me.A diplomat at the British embassy in Paris told me that whenever the ambassador invited the local British press over for lunch, he referred to it as feeding time at the trough.At the next embassy lunch, I looked around the table at the hacks who had stayed in Paris long after their staff jobs expired.Each month, they seemed to descend ever farther down the freelance ladder, their clothes deteriorating, their lips stained darker with cheap red wine.There was one who only ever asked one question, but he applied it to any topic: “Ambassador, what does all this mean for Europe?” The ambassador would pull at his cuffs and reply politely across the elaborately set table, but you could feel the ghost of the Duke of Wellington, a former occupant of the residence, cringing at this unseemly rabble.After long evenings of red wine and conversation with friends, I would lie in bed staring at the ceiling, my mind churning with ill-defined fears and desires.I looked up the totem pole at my newspaper and saw middle-aged men complaining about their salaries and the mediocrity of their managers and harking back to their days reporting from the road.I dreaded being called back to work at a desk in London.So I wrote a letter to myself describing my feelings.I wrote that it was exhausting to feel like this, constantly thinking about change.I was thirty-one years old and had one of the most coveted jobs in my profession and yet all I could think of was what would happen next.I was whipsawed between feeling self-indulgent and feeling sensible, worrying that if I let my next career change happen to me rather than making it happen myself, I would deeply regret it.I wrote about Daw Ma Ma and how the memory of what she built magnified my family’s sense of loss, wielding a nostalgic grip on us some fifty years later.Business had been her salvation, and business, I felt after avoiding it for so long, might also be mine.The HarvardBusinessSchool website was cluttered with inspiring bait.Theodore Roosevelt’s challenge to “Dare Mighty Things” stood out in large crimson letters.Words like passionand leadershipwere sprinkled about like punctuation [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]