Final Word: The one that got away

LIKE many people I have had major set backs in my working life. The majority of them relate to jobs or roles within jobs which I did not get and which at the time I was convinced I should have got. I say at the time because when I look back at some of them now it would have been a disaster for everyone concerned, particularly me.

Perhaps that is something everyone says when they were not appointed to some post they desired. But the longer one does a job the more one comes to an understanding of what you are good at and what you are not.

However, not getting a job forever leaves you with two questions which never seem to recede: Would I have grown into the role and become good at the things I was not so accomplished in and, most forcefully, what could I have done differently to have created a different outcome.

The opinion of others, even those you trust, does not help in addressing the angst connected to these two questions. When I failed to get one job which I thought was my holy grail I recall the person I considered to be my best professional friend and mentor immediately texting me with the words ‘’Thank God for that. It was definitely not the job for you”, and yet I have never had the courage to ask him why he thought that. At the time I thought he should have been more loyal. Even if your career takes a more positive turn after the setback it never takes away the constant nagging thought that this job, this holy grail, was the one that got away.

So how must it feel to have thrown away your one chance at becoming president of the nation you have served and love and respect above all others?

I am not going to get into the intricacies of why Jim Gavin found himself engulfed in the worst days of his life.

Stuff happens and sometimes we have to face the consequences of that stuff although, of course, if you are powerful and wealthy enough stuff done seems to have no consequence. Ironically that seems to be the case in politics everywhere else but not in this small island. So I offer no judgement merely an interest in how he must be feeling and how he begins to deal with the missed opportunity.

I suspect only those who have served in the public sphere really understand the kind of scrutiny, and private interrogation, your life gets when you put yourself forward for office.

In some ways it might be argued that he should not have been put in that position, that those who have lived that scrutiny and experienced it, should have known better than to put him in that position.

Being a good football manager does not necessarily mean you will be a good politician. So tonight he will be sitting somewhere, surrounded by those trying to console him and those trying to minimise the fall out from the revelations. He, although so surrounded, will be deeply lonely and consumed by regret, horror, perhaps a little shame and, worst of all, the constancy of ‘what if’?

He may never get over it and it will loom over everything he tries to do in the future. At least the other two candidates showed some presidential aspects by sympathising and wishing him well. Which is just as well because whichever of them becomes the new president they will have to follow someone for whom work angst is, most definitely, a distant memory.