Worklife
Issue No. 3 - December/ 2001/january
the bright ideas man - fun first
by Colin Pearce
‘And don’t take your mobile phone on your day off,’ I said.
The business people sucked all the air out of the seminar room and sat there opening and shutting their mouths like fish freshly landed on a heaving deck.
I moved in for the kill.
I said, ‘Take a book onto the porch or your golf bag to a new course or take your partner in one hand and an apple in the other, lie on the grass and look up at the clouds.
‘Don’t get out on the front lawn with a bucket and a fork and dig weeds. That’s not living. That’s practising to be a cemetery attendant.
‘Try spending a day getting to know Sir Douglas Mawson at the Museum, or sampling every pie and cake shop between Adelaide and Mannum via Mount Pleasant.
‘Or go to Lebanon like I did a in October and sail up the coast from Beirut to Byblos and imagine you are Alexander the Great or Fred the Phoenician plying the blue Mediterranean to trade and conquer.
NO IDEA
Entrepreneurs have no idea what fun is or why they should have it. When I show them how to have ten days of fun a month they laugh at me. ’Work is my fun,’ they boast.
Sure it is. So is banging your head with a mallee root. This is the kind of statement made by someone who has a large hole in his or her marble bag.
NO FUN AT ALL
At age 28 Carl inherited his company from his father’s estate. He has managed it for his mother an...
