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.