Maybe like me you wonder why some people are successful in their company, while others, often more talented, are living Groundhog Day stuck in a rut. Turns out there’s a formula. Something I stumbled on in Florida working for a tech company.
A little about me: I grew up on the West Coast of Scotland in an industrial city called Glasgow. My mother was a single parent having divorced my father just before I was born. She had enough of his drinking and promises of fortune that never materialized and one evening packed her bags in Salt Lake City, Utah, and ran with my older brother, my older sister, with me in the womb to Scotland.
My grandmother often lived with us and played the father figure in our house. She was a strong and determined lady called Ann, born 1918 and lived through World War II. She was someone we looked up to and never wanted to disappoint.
We didn’t have much growing up. Most of my early years were spent in small council flats in mixed-race micro-cultures where we were the minority. We had necessities but few luxuries and wasn’t until I was fifteen that we cobbled together money to buy the first family car. This was a big deal and opened a world of adventure. Even if it was just driving to the supermarket instead of walking there and back, which was often a 3-hour round-trip, heavy grocery bags in hand.
At fifteen in high school, I lacked ambition. Going to university for a degree never crossed my mind. It seemed I was destined to follow my brothers path working in one of the many Pakistani-owned “cash-and-carry” sweat-shop warehouses that dominated the inner city.
It seemed that school hated me, or at least was not structured to accommodate my learning style. And I hated school, so would spend my time entertaining myself and those around me.
I’ll not forget my primary school Headmaster Mrs. Wetherspoon dragging me by my ear once, to the sink in the cafeteria, washing my mouth using a brush plastered with carbolic soap, because I was shouting obscenities at other kids. Or how viral panic spread around school when people read on the notice board the wrong vaccine was administered to everyone the day before – a letter I had fabricated on my Brother typewriter.
School was done with me, and I was done with school. So shortly before my sixteenth birthday, I left.
