Why you should be less ‘Hoorah’ and more ‘Hygge’ this winter.
In the animated excellence of Ratatouille, the weary food critic, the aptly named Anton Ego, wants only one thing when he visits Gusteau’s eponymous restaurant. He tells the waiter: ‘I’d like some fresh, clear, well-seasoned perspective.’
At the beginning of a new year, we could all do with that. And it’s something where older people in business or indeed the business of life have a lead. They have perspective, decades of it, that younger people don’t have. And now is the time to deploy that perspective.
In his incredible meditation on his life, Oliver Sacks says in Gratitude that he realised he had much greater perspective on his life at 80 than he had at 60. I don’t have that many decades under my belt yet, but even I’ve noticed how the holiday companies start to ramp it up in January, how magazines will soon be telling us to get ‘beach ready’ bodies, like they do every year. …
How model Melina Krause founded her own business — and found herself
Melina Krause has been through a lot of changes in her life, some of them pretty hard. But if you had to pick one moment that shows how the human spirit is not dimmed it would be when she hit 50 and decided to become a model.
Soon after that she decided it was the right time for her to set up her first business, on her own. Hitting 50, with all the experience and knowledge that can come with that, has some real upsides.
Seeing her walk through a fashionable part of London, immaculately turned out, on her way to a casting or a meeting with an interior designer, shows how far she’s come. From Kenya in fact. Her Indian-born parents moved to Kenya but then, when she was about 11, they all had to leave Africa because of Kenyan independence. Melina and her brother Jason had British passports and their parents weren't about to give those up. …
Why retiring at 50 meant Neil Franks could enjoy life — and start working again
From the age of 24 until he was 55, Neil Franks sort of disappeared from the Western world. As he puts it: ‘I was transferred from London to Singapore at 24. I arrived on a Sunday night, and the next morning I went to the office. About 31 years later I left.’
Those years weren’t spent in some sort of sweatshop slavery. Instead they were spent working for one company, Glencore, which was one of the earliest pioneers, back in the 1970s, of freely trading oil as a commodity. Now it’s a massive multinational PLC but back then it was where people worked hugely hard with vast responsibilities and who were rewarded in equal measure. …
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