Wednesday 20 November 2013

The illusion of Potential - A Disease of the Age.

(sorry no chapter breaks in this - its a Blogger-bug) This is a copy of my letter as sent to Unlocking Potential, Cornwall. Its a business initiative of our times, I'm pretty sure theres one similar near to you. I shall not be attending your ‘Business Boot camp Sessions’ and I thought you may like to know why; I do not want you to be able to claim that you have helped me in any real way, as you have not. Only money could do that right now and the offer of that was my incentive for attending the initial sessions, where I soon found out that, that golden carrot was only to be snatched away from under my nose and offered to those with a better chance of offering a good return by way of providing statistical evidence of creating employment, despite the fact that those figures of employment are falsely swollen by graduate internships lasting for no more than a year and which in real terms amount to nothing more than paid work-experience. I did all my work experience, un-paid and off my own back, so no I don’t approve. I did find some of the initial sessions helpful, and was encouraged when it was mentioned by one sympathetic speaker; that success is hardly ever achieved alone and that most successful people have been helped a great deal along the way. This statement was soon to be proved correct as a pretty girl confidently discussed in front of the group her plans for a Cornish design agency and then referred to her badly drawn (and vacuous) life experience diagram supporting the worst examples of stick figures I think I’ve ever seen. This is just the sort of competition which I see your start-up scheme supporting, year on year, saturating the market and creating an un-level playing field for struggling individuals such as myself. Whose experience and personal commitment is constantly undermined by business hand-outs which set-up an unfair advantage based on no real skills assessment what-so ever. I attended my interview and noticed the shiny gold band glistening on the index finger of my interviewer. We all make compromises in life to get the best out of our lot and I thought to myself that my ‘interviewer’ my have chosen his family, as is often the case and that’s what makes His career of dishing out placatory venture capitalist hand-outs rewarding to him. The job is a means to an ends of greater personal value. That is not my life. I have spent my whole life training, re-training and constantly up-grading my skills which in turn allow for the creative fulfilment of my potential. I have sacrificed chances of security offered by a regular income or of having a family of my own, in the vague hope that my own talents may be fulfilled within my lifetime and become my main income. I still have a second job after 7yrs in my own business and I remain heavily in debt due to my education and business investments. I did not factor in a triple-dip recession. So don’t tell me that I’m not worth investing in. I do not want to indirectly pay your wages for attending the ‘Boot-camp sessions’. I do not want you to pay a business mentor on my behalf; who is most probably my contemporary, drawn from an exclusive list of hand-shakers and back-scratchers and who of course is worthily seeking an extra income. I am aware that by writing this I am in danger of offending a large number of business professionals in Cornwall but that is no reason at all not to do it. I am an Artist and that is what Artists do. They make social comment where others can’t, wont or don’t know how too.