Meeting with Triumph and Disaster

Lessons in meeting with these two imposters in our lives. It's a business skill.

There’s an ‘old’, long-dead man who made me alert to a simple but important truth about life, but also I think about business and, importantly again, about being in business for yourself. It’s about mental focus and direction.

Photo by Giorgio Grani on Unsplash

Allow me to ramble on this for a mo!

Rudyard Kipling died in 1936. See, I said he was ‘old’ and dead. And in these days of politically correct attitudes, where anti-colonialism rules and ‘people from history are often considered ‘evil’ (so it seems), my bet would be that Kipling would be ‘cancelled’. Plus, any statues of him (there is one in Burwash UK) would presumably be graffitied (at minimum). To some people Kipling is likely associated with, and representative of, the declining days of Britain’s colonial power. That probably qualifies for organised book burnings!

Kipling wrote The Jungle Book, that’s the one which Disney (and others) made films about. The Jungle Book is the story around which that (sometimes) allegedly para-military organisation the Boy Scouts was formed. Ah, a confession here. I was a long-time Scout, so I suppose I’m destined to be cancelled? But let’s put all that to one side!

To my mind, Kipling wrote many ‘messages’ that speak across the ages. One of his most enduring poems is “If.” He writes as if he is a father to a son instructing him on how to get the right balance in life. I suppose in Daoist terms it’s the quest to manage the Ying and Yang of life!