No Vision All Drive, 3rd Edition

Chapter 1 Learning to Be an Entrepreneur

It is a mystery to me why I was drawn to the business world. My father was a longtime engineer and administrator for the city of Montreal and my mother a part-time social worker working at a children’s agency. Both my parents were extremely liberal, socially conscious activists. My brother became a university professor and my sister is a health researcher, so I am the black sheep of the family. Although I consider myself a liberal and certainly lean far left on the American political spectrum, I always joke that my family considers me to be the Republican in the family.

I had what I consider to be a normal childhood full of friends and sports. I was smart and did well in school, but was never an overachiever. Once I left high school and started CEGEP (Quebec’s equivalent of junior college), my priorities became friends and skiing, in that order, with academics relegated to whatever time was left. I did just enough work and attended just enough classes to get by. A career in business never occurred to me, as I thought I was more likely to become a professional hockey player or full-time ski instructor than anything else.

At CEGEP I had thoughts of being an engineer, perhaps because my father was one, but I was turned down by McGill’s engineering school, the school that all my friends were going to go to. My second choice at McGill was physics, although I have no idea why. I think I might have been sitting in a physics class at CEGEP when ...