Today I want to set the scene for the next ezine by recounting an anecdote told by my favorite business writer, Charles Handy (in Waiting for the Mountain to Move). Handy's father was a Protestant vicar in rural Catholic Ireland:
I was very fond of my father, but disappointed in him. He had turned down big city parishes, had settled for a humdrum life in the same little backwater.
Meanwhile, Handy himself had become a Shell executive, then an academic:
Soon I was a professor, gallivanting around to conferences, consulting, lunching, dining, on the edge of the big time. A book had been published and articles galore. We had two young children, an apartment in town and a cottage in the country. More than that, I was tremendously busy, with a diary crammed with engagements. I was a success!
When his father died, Handy flew to Ireland. He followed the hearse down the country roads to what he expected to be a quiet funeral:
It was hard to thread our way between the queues of cars trying to get to the little country church. The place was packed, overflowing...
As I stood by his grave..., as I saw the tears in the eyes of the hundreds of people who had come from everywhere to say farewell to this "quiet" man, I turned away and began to think.
Who, I wondered, would come to my funeral with tears in their eyes? What is success and who was successful, me or my father?
More about this in the next ezine…
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