Dear Mario,
I hope you are swell. Since I know that when you open this letter you will be ten years older and the year will be 2020, I will dispense my advice succinctly because I know that your bedtime is 10 PM and the attention span of men in their late 30’s tends to be much shorter than when you were pulling all-nighters in college.
I can see that you’ve made it. You have a wonderful family to which you are totally devoted. Your mom gets along with your wife and it is quite fortunate that the two of them don’t share a common language. Your father is still buzzing with pride because you named your firstborn son, Georgi, after him as it should be according to Bulgarian tradition. Nice house you got there as well, and that in Mayfair – the one neighbourhood in London where everyone speaks with the poshest of British accents. I know you miss New York, Berlin and Buenos Aires but think about how lucky you’ve been to be able to live in all those places. And let’s not forget the best one of them – Chapel Hill.
Indeed it is great to see that you’ve accomplished so many of the goals that you set for yourself when you decided to go $100 000 in debt when you came to business school, a number that I am sure still haunts you when you look at your monthly bank statements. However, let me take a step further and analyze the kind of personal qualities that enabled you to get there. No, you were never a finance genius as all members of your study group can recall, you were never a case study superstar and when you thought you had drawn your best picture in art class as a kid you had to settle for a stellar C-. But if people needed someone to bring different disciplines together and to connect the dots between economics, politics, history and business then you’d be the one to talk to. In addition to that your ability to thrive in diverse team environments has allowed you to navigate the treacherous currents of many professional environments. And then, of course, there is your adaptability. No matter where you go and no matter what you do you adapt. You had to learn it the hard way ever since that one August morning in 2001 when you entered your college dorm room with nothing but your two suitcases and realized that you’d be spending an entire year in the same room with a complete stranger from the Garden State of New Jersey.
However, it is fair to say that during the heady days of your youth you were not always able to link those qualities to the things you did that impacted the world around you. Let me refresh your memory – International Business Association at UNC, The Net Impact Greening Committee, Habitat, volunteering through the Bulgarian Business Club in London, the Davidson College Student Government, teaching basic German to K12 kids in Davidson and the list goes on and on. I hope you’ve been true to your promise to change that.
You have always been a firm believer in ‘equality of opportunity’ especially when it comes to helping people who never had the kind of fortunate start in life that you enjoyed and I am convinced that you’ve been able to use your personal qualities to make a difference. For example, I imagine you doing that by advising the Bulgarian government on ways to provide better and more practical education for children from the Roma minority using your background in economics and business but also appreciating the historical sensitivities related to that group of people. Or I could see you successfully implementing World Bank projects in Asia and Africa. I also want to remind you of the promise to spend a week each year teaching basic business skills in developing countries. Most importantly, don’t forget your commitment to pass on the belief that equal opportunities for all make our society a better one to your kids as this is the one tangible long-term outcome of all your efforts that you’ve always thought you could at least strive for. And, of course, I hope you’ve been sending checks to Davidson College and UNC on a regular basis!
Sincerely,
Your younger, less cynical self
No comments:
Post a Comment