So, the guy's name was Nigel Mae Barlow.
I haven't even checked if he's still going.
I saw him speak as a warm-up for someone else at what was called the London Business Forum (I haven't checked whether that's still going either).
In those days, pre 2008, I used to go to London to visit the London Business Forum with Tom (our super fantastic marketing and academy director), Tom's dad.
Shaun was a teacher who became a super head teacher, and then went into industry, and he was part of the London Business Forum and would invite me down for some of the lectures and presentations by business leaders and by business coaches.
Maybe it's where I managed to push forward my fascination with how business works.
Nigel Barlow, though, was a revelation; he was actually there as the warm-up act for someone called Edward de Bono, the guy who defined the concept of lateral thinking.
Barlow was much, much better than De Bono.
The first thing he did was a method of introduction which I've used hundreds of times when I've stood up and spoken, where people have never met you before, and you ask them to make assumptions about you. It's super clever and shows people's prejudices fantastically before you start a session for teaching.
The second thing I learned from him, though, was that ‘it's already late’.
This was a phrase he used throughout when he was trying to create the urgency that you needed to have to understand what it was, to provide and to create growth and forward motion and urgency. His argument was that if you had none of these things, there would be no progress made, and the reason you were there was to find out how to make progress. I didn't learn that from Nigel Barlow; it just tapped into what I already felt.
I always feel like I'm behind, always feel like I'm playing catch-up with other people who have had better ideas than me or who have worked harder, or who have achieved greater things (whatever that means).
It drives people to distraction, and in fact, it drives me to distraction too.
It means I keep chasing unicorns into forests, thinking that something is going to come of it, which ofttimes never does, or certainly feels like I may have wasted the time trying to develop relationships or projects or opportunities with people and organisations where there was never going to be an opportunity to come back.
To date, I have danced an education dance with all of the major corporate entities in the United Kingdom, apart from one.
I got excited that they were interested and have been let down dramatically.
I've done this with dental groups too, and I've done it with individuals, practices, and other organisations, but the truth is that I've learned a ton from doing this, from feeling that it's already late, I've learned how other people work and how what works for other people doesn't work in many cases. I've been able to recycle that back into my own business, to make that work (at least for me) as well as it possibly could.
It will never disappear, this sensation of urgency, this feeling that it's already late. As you get older, it may get harder; you have less of the acute, sharp energy that you had before, but more of the wisdom. It will keep going until I don't keep going.
I will always feel that we're running after something which is just fractionally out of reach.
Blog Post Number - 4543
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