The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [70]
We tend to cling to the notion that all human qualities should cohere, that we may be at once beautiful and thoughtful, vigilant and relaxed, gifted and well balanced – but it seemed clear that, admirable though Sir Bob’s achievements and energy might be, it would surely not be such a treat to be his wife or son.
At least Sir Bob was inspiringly democratic. In any area of business he happened to contemplate, he refused to believe that success would be impossible for someone like him. His varied activities had furnished him with an unusually keen sense of how things worked, freeing him of the naive and childish perspective from which most of us still see the world. He regarded the large artefacts of finance and industry which surround us, and which we often assume to be as inevitable as the earth’s natural features – our warehouses, shopping centres, control towers, banks and holidays resorts – not as the products of remote or obscure processes, but of efforts by people a little like himself, plucky and hard-working types who felt that destiny was theirs to mould. He knew how things fitted together: he knew how to finance a supermarket and go about building a fifty-two-storey skyscraper. He knew which city lawyer could help him to acquire an oil platform and how to negotiate with the government of Australia to buy up private schools in New South Wales. He could look out across any landscape and be confident that it was not the gods who had made it, but people a little like himself. He was – in this sense, at least – a true adult.
There was time allowed for questions after the talk, and a studious-looking man seized the opportunity to stand up and ask why Sir Bob had decided to leave his fortune to a university library. To judge from the latter’s monosyllabic response, the inquiry either irritated or bored him. His detachment reminded me of the attitude of the many barons throughout history who had spent their careers plundering the earth and hounding their employees, but who then, nearing death, had quietly dropped their loot into foundations which to this day continue to distribute money to impoverished souls afflicted by a strong desire to write monographs on early Assyrian pottery or to play the bassoon – as if the barons had ultimately felt they had no other option but to redirect their ambitions and their avarice in order to wind up seeming good in the most conventional of ways.
5.
I left the entrepreneurial gathering feeling at once inspired and chastened. I recognised my admiration for visionaries such as Mohsen Bahmani (of the floating shoes), whose fledgling businesses sought to pick up on and exploit desires overlooked by more mainstream enterprises. Yet I also appreciated the extent to which the aims of these energetic men and women were undermined by their obvious misunderstanding of how people actually went about making decisions on such matters as how to cross a lake or eat crisps, how to store products in the bathroom or put out a fire. These individuals were writing their stories in a subgenre of contemporary fiction, the business plan, and populating them with characters endowed with deeply implausible personalities, an oversight which would eventually be punished not by a scathing review by some bright young person from the London Review of Books but by a lack of custom and a prompt foreclosure.
By contrast, Sir Bob’s grasp of psychology could not be faulted. He apprehended the public’s love of spacious parking-lots