Bill takes a gamble on a natural winner
Sunday December 20 2009
The recovered addict can make a formidable business person and winning 'apprentice', writes Declan Lynch
THE victory of Steve Raynor in The Apprentice was a good day for Ireland. In a country which has an unnaturally large number of alcoholics and compulsive gamblers, here was a man who had done a bit of both. While his main rivals had absorbed all the usual business babble, going forward, it became increasingly clear that Steve with his addictions was one of our own.
Even with his English accent, the moment that he told interrogator Gavin Duffy that he had spent much of his youth drinking alcoholically and gambling compulsively was the moment that most viewers thought, "You're hired".
It was then a matter of waiting for Bill to make the right call, which he duly did. Doubtless, Bill would have been deeply impressed by Steve's tour de force during the episode in which he sold vast quantities of nasal strips, very quickly.
Indeed, he seemed so far ahead of the rest in this department, he made them look like Andy Cole to his Fernando Torres -- they said of Cole that he would need three chances to score one, whereas Torres needs only one chance to score three.
Ah, but where did he acquire these "people skills"? Having fully subscribed to at least one of Steve's addictions, I may be a small bit biased here, but he probably picked up a lot more wisdom in the pub and at the racetrack than he would ever have done at Harvard with the Breffmeister.
Alas, such wisdom is only properly realised when you stop doing the thing that helped you to acquire the wisdom in the first place. It is the agonising predicament in which all addicts eventually find themselves. And, for many of them, stopping is just too hard.
But if they can stop, and if they can emerge on the other side of it sober, as Steve has done, there is arguably no better way these days of measuring a person's character and their general ability to cope with the challenges, going forward; and going backwards; and sometimes even going from side to side, in the wrong direction.
Bill, whose organisation contains an addiction treatment centre situated in Co Wicklow, may have a special insight here.
Of course, it is only in relatively recent times in this country that we accepted the validity of the proposition that giving up the drink, and even the gambling, might make our lives somehow more manageable. For a long time we muddled along with a culture of massive indulgence interrupted by spells of white-knuckle abstinence, and many of us somehow learned to function under those conditions.
It is still true to say that almost all the journalists I have ever known who were any good were either alcoholics or recovering alcoholics. And there were far more of the former than the latter.
It may be the "people skills" you acquire from talking a lot, to total strangers, or the natural curiosity of the person who is constantly testing his own limits of endurance, but the idea of being a good journalist and an alcoholic always made sense in a way that being, say, a good brain surgeon and an alcoholic might not.
Many a perfectly good doctor is also an alcoholic, or an addicted gambler, but he will tend to be a GP rather than a specialist. The fitful brilliance of his mind will not settle on any one narrow discipline, or be detained by a single subject, which is why he can work well in general practice but you don't really want him opening up your skull on a Monday morning.
For Steve Raynor, the world of business which awaits him has always been a playground for the alcoholic and the gambler, not to mention the sex addict and whatever you call the sort of fellow who goes to see Riverdance 128 times.
But there can hardly be any doubt that the modern businessman who has grown out of his addictions has the edge over the guys who are still out there, still playing hard.
Steve, with his understanding of his own condition, will be smiling wryly as he encounters men who will go to the most fantastic lengths in order to devise new excuses to go drinking, be it the stag weekend in Vilnius, or the spot of shooting on a cold and frosty morning, or just the usual panoply of "corporate entertainment". He will be keeping his head, when all around him are losing theirs.
And while there must be a natural gambling urge in all business people, in the financial services sector and on the stock exchanges it would appear that the number of unreformed addicts is so overwhelming, it has not just resulted in self-destruction on an epic scale, it has virtually destroyed our civilisation.
Yes, Steve will need to steer clear of a lot of bad company, waiting out there to toast his continued success. But, as a recovering addict, he has the invaluable assistance of all that feelgood jargon which seems to work as well in the AA room as it does in the boardroom -- "don't let your past dictate your future" is his favourite.
Recovery from addiction is essentially a process of reimagining, a creative process at which many do not succeed.
But those who do, like Steve, can be unbeatable.
- Declan Lynch
Originally published in
