Last week I got an email from a young reader asking me to pass on the wisest piece of advice that I’d ever been given.
I thought for a bit but couldn’t think of any advice at all. My parents were not the sort to hand out all-purpose tips, although my father did sometimes gloomily quote G?K Chesterton as he bodged a repair of some broken crockery: If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
These past two decades I have been up to my neck in advice from business leaders in books, blogs, articles and interviews, but none of it has stuck. The only tip that I can remember came from the recently deceased feminist sex kitten, Helen Gurley Brown: What you have to do is work with the raw material you have, namely you, and never let up.