Autobituary of a dying man [Part 2 - Take 1]

During the summer of 2009, he refused to intern because none of the remaining opportunities he was able to find were worth spending his time on. Jack felt that was the perfect time for him to take a sabbatical summer and do something he really likes for a change. That’s when he remembered earlier events in his life: his novel at age 14, his play at age 19, his unique name that had a lot of bearing on his social life, his unique nickname that only refers to him wherever one can find it online, and his knack for inventing and torturing fictitious characters before making them heroes.

He also remembered his mentors; random wise and very particular people life put on his way to benefit from. Hung at the tip of their words and stories, he learnt that listening would be the strongest tool he could ever acquire. Listening to such incredible people helped him leapfrog his age group and become a premature prisoner of his old mind in a decaying forever-young wannabe society. That only allowed him to approach women older than him with a stunningly daring mind and unbelievable ease, but also prevented him from being able to completely connect with young women of his age due to their relative younger mental age.

All the weird and unusual events of his life served as fodder for his ideas, and his fertile mind served as the brewery for the story to come up with gems of plots. And that’s how he soon embarked on a journey to write his second—and last book. He wanted it to be his master opus. So he worked on it mostly by night. As a young teenager of 12, he used to let everybody go to sleep, sneak out to the dining room with a candle, and in the dark, he used to sit in a cold and quiet room where he was alone with ink, paper and a plethora of imaginary worlds, characters and stories.

He wanted to reproduce this same old combination of space, time and emotions. That’s why he partially had changed his hairstyle to what it was 16 years earlier. At times, the feeling of being unlawful and betraying the young dreamer he had left behind as he grew up gave him the creeps. Not disappointing the boy inside the man was an obsession he grew up with, fearful of bad surprises and sad endings.

In 2010, he graduates with a lot of useful tools, a ton of ideas, a great global network of peers and an overall very fun experience. He decides to go back to his birthplace set on building businesses that could only have positive impact on society. He wasn't the avid capitalist he thought he'd become anymore. All he was interested in was how he could create businesses that can earn reasonable profits while creating real added value in his community; and, mostly, how he could significantly impact his small nation and improve lives.

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For many years, he went around the emerging region in the Middle East, North Africa and East Europe, taking care of some businesses he ventured with or created himself with different partners he met along the way. He was obsessed with efficiency and optimization, something he carried along from his engineering background. But also, he taught businesses to focus on their audiences, and taught them that profits are a reflection of satisfaction, loyalty and returning customers. What he wanted to proliferate was not a model, but rather, a philosophy of doing responsible business and driving positive impact in communities served by his businesses.

Ten years later, tired of helping businesses do responsible business, he realized that vile human nature was rooted deep in our behavioral patterns. The temptation to render businesses down to a pure revenue-and-cost exercise prevented many of his partners from seeing the big picture he was striving to help them see. He called it quits, sold all shares of his businesses and gave up on the modern capitalism altogether. He sold his penthouse in downtown Beirut and decided to move to a place where minds where still fertile and where a hope for a brighter future remained.

Autobituary of a dying man [Part 1 - Take 1]

Jack King, aged a few decades and some years, dies tomorrow of no reason at all. A prominent figure of the unknown world and a hall-of-famer beyond the history books, tomorrow we shall be missing a man whose work has reached so many but was known to very few.

In 1982, Jack was born in the other city known as Paris in a middle class Christian family to Zwei King, a professor of German language and Sam Bouf who was still studying for her business degree by the time she gave birth to him.

Early on, Jack was the victim of the January effect. He was sent to school in September 1984, aged 2 years and 7 months. At the Catholic school of Sagesse, he was a slave to the stimuli of his parents and teachers, dedicating his entire asocial existence to satisfying older people’s desires and requests. To externalize his childish energies, his parents let him join a scouting association where he excelled as an active member and shone to leadership from the beginning.

At age 11, he decided that he didn't want to part his hair on the right anymore. His parents were receptive after a period of resistance. They allowed him to comb his hair backwards hoping this new "western" hairstyle would not affect his grades. As expected, it did not. At age 14, he had already published his first short novel.

Having finished school obsessed with success and drunk with competition, he had little orientation and so much potential that he ended up following the herd of bright top-of-their-class students and went to a top engineering school to learn how to build things for a wage. He also decided that he was never going to be a professional violinist; so he gave up his lessons after 11 years of courses and decided to learn to sing opera.

Six years in engineering school to obtain a five year degree taught him to deal with failures and humiliation. It also taught him that things should be done in a way that satisfies the end result and not for the theoretical utopian raison-d’être they teach you about. While he was in school, he also became a man and learnt everything there is to know about unfaithfulness and what it means to the significant other.

His career promptly took off as a software engineer, working for a couple of start-ups for short periods of time. His failure to abide to a hierarchy he did not believe in made him a bad fit for mushy cultures. He spent some time off trying to become a quick millionaire selling magic products to a dupable crowd. Then he tried to start a software company, with no avail. At that stage, he learnt that things are not as easy as they may seem to the hopeful ambitious. Jack also learned that shortcuts are a thing of the software engineering world, but less so of the real one.

He left the Paris of the East and settled in the Paris of the West after that. Over there, he pretended to work. As a tech consultant, he was paid good money but knew that he was just a passenger at a station waiting for the next train. While he waited in this marvelous city of light and darkness, he learned to charm, lie, cheat, betray, love, be betrayed and overcome hatred. He also learned how to defend himself in court, while enjoying Europe by car, train or plane.

In 2008, he joined a top business school in the US, and decided to part his hair on the left side like it was when he was 11. Behind him, he left a time of false hopes and scattered dreams and a place of beautiful memories and dear images. As he started his MBA, he had high expectations stemming from the culture he was exposed to at one of the finest programs in the galaxy. But as soon as the world economy fell down on its knees due to uncontrolled greed by amoral bankers, his opportunity frontier started to shrink at breakneck speeds. And as summer of 2009 closed in, he started realizing that he was heading down a dark tunnel. Being a fan of surprises, this kind of masochistic uncertainty entertained his overly agitated mind.