What we need to do to get ahead in life

There is probably no person on Earth that has at some time or another, lived his or her life entirely free from the cravings for achieving goals in whatever they do and since it plays an important role in the development of our personalities, social adjustments, and our cultures, it is for this reason, we should make a serious effort to understand what prompts us to seek such cravings. One of the main reasons we have this craving is because none of us wants to feel that we are inferior to others notwithstanding the fact that we are inferior to many of our contemporaries. It’s a fact of life and most people begrudgingly recognize this fact. To overcome our feelings of inferiority, many of us strive to make a name for ourselves and leave our mark on the sands of time.

But factors that cannot be ignored are that in order to accomplish this, we have to have enough intelligence to be capable of meeting the challenges we face in life and we have to have ambition or as others would say; a compelling drive to get ahead in this world. On top of that, we also have to have patience and not give up too early in our endeavors. Further, we have to be willing to sacrifice ourselves either in time or in money to get ahead and finally, we have to be smart enough to recognize the opportunities that occasionally crop up in our lives and jump into them. If we don’t possess these attributes, then getting ahead in life and accomplishing our goals in this world will be very difficult if not impossible to achieve.

There are many men and women whose fathers and mothers were leaders in industry, and as a direct result, they lived in fine homes, were given a good education and inherited their parent’s businesses which thereby resulted in many of them being successful in life and enjoying life to the fullest. At the same time, there are also many who had none of these advantages and despite that; they too became leaders in industry, and also in government, in science and other aspects of human endeavor and as such, had fulfilling lives.

I suppose in one sense, I could say that it was unfortunate for me that I didn’t have the advantages that rich and influential parents give their offspring. I use the word, unfortunate because my childhood (if you will forgive the expression) sucked. Notwithstanding that my great paternal grandfather was one of Canada’s richest men who hobnailed with the rich and famous and although my paternal grandparents were reasonably well off; my mother was not. She had been date raped by my father in January 1933 and rather than face her mother’s wrath, she ran away from home. When I was born in October of that year, the only home my mother and I had to go to was a two-roomed shack in the farming area of Scarborough in which the shack had a wood stove, table and two chairs, a small bed and a dresser. It had no water or any electricity. My crib was the bottom drawer of the old beat-up dresser.

I did have two advantages however that has sustained me throughout my life and they are; I was born with a reasonably high IQ and a body with no deformities or serious illnesses. That being as it is, there would be nothing that could stop me from getting ahead in life; or so I thought. There are many people on this planet who are very intelligent and have bodies we can all admire and yet, they have wasted their god-given gifts by accomplishing very little during their lives. Some even graduated from university with summa cum laud written on their degrees and that is about as much that they ever accomplished in life.

Unfortunately for me, I didn’t get a university degree that had summa cum laud written on it until I was seventy-two years of age when I received my Doctorate in Criminology. How many people do you know; who while in grade one in elementary school, was actually sent back to kindergarten? Mind you. I was excited to no end. I really like my kindergarten teacher. She was much nicer to me that that old crab in grade one. How many people do you know spend three years in grade five? Despite the fact that during my final year in grade five, I only spend the mornings at school since our original school burned down in September of that year. I passed into grade six. Grade five by then was a breeze considering that I had two previous years to prepare for my high marks in my final report card.

When I was in grade eight at a private residential school, I was already sixteen years of age. I was the oldest in the class but no one made fun of me since I was also the biggest in the class. One afternoon a week, I taught music at that school during that school year. I had the same authority as a teacher and could strap students who misbehaved. Of course I never strapped any student in my class because after school, I was just another student and the last thing I wanted was to be beaten up by my schoolmates for my earlier indiscretions.

Now you may ask; if I was so poor, how come I was sent to a private Catholic residential school? Well, the school felt sorry for my mother so she was able to enroll my younger brother and I into the school for as little as fifty dollars a month for the both of us. We and two other boys were the only Protestants in the school. We were never forced to embrace the Catholic religion and when the other boys of the school would go to Mass in the morning, we four would be sent to the school library to study. And study I did. I did research and as direct result of my research, I found all the pictures of the naked native women in Africa in all the National Geographic magazines in the library.

I graduated from grade nine in 1951 and began working five and a half days a week for fifteen dollars a week. I joined the Canadian navy at the age of seventeen with high ambitions of working my way up the hierarchy of navy ranks until I would be commanding a warship as its captain. At the end of three years service, I had only moved up to the rank of able seaman. I did some calculations. At the speed I was moving up the ranks, I would be a captain of a warship when I was one hundred and twenty years of age.

This leads me to the crux of my essay. Ambition. What do we need to get ahead? Well for starters, we need brains that can do the job. Second, we need the drive to get ahead. Third, we need patience and perseverance, fourth, the willingness to sacrifice our time and possibly even our money to get ahead and finally, enough intelligence to recognize the opportunities that are before us so that we can take advantage of them.

Well I had the intelligence and later the drive to get ahead. We are all born with our brains intact and most of us are intelligent to some degree but the drive to get ahead is something that we acquire as we get older. We need someone in our lives that we admire and respect for their accomplishments. There were three people in my life that (without their knowledge) inspired me to be ambitious and get somewhere in life where I could earn respect from my contemporaries and perhaps, possibly leave my mark in history.

The first was my paternal grandfather, Alex Banfield. Both he and my grandmother in 1905; went to the upper regions of Nigeria to preach to the natives there, the joys of Christianity. Strangely enough (as I was to learn much later) they spent thirty years there and yet, he never converted one native in Nigeria into being a Christian. Mind you, he tried hard enough but converting the Muslims in the upper regions of Nigeria into Christians is about as pointless as trying to unscramble an egg. Despite his failure in this endeavour, he did accomplish something in Nigeria that made him famous and highly respected. He was the first and only person who translated the Nupe language of Nigeria into English. When he returned to Toronto for a sabbatical, he bought a printing press and later brought it with him when he and my grandmother returned to Nigeria. The first thing he did when he got there was to print the Nupe/English 800-page, two-volume dictionary. (it’s still being sold on Amazon) The dictionary was later used for the schools that came into existence in Nigeria after that and it opened up commerce between the Nigerians and business people from other countries. What made that all possible? My grandfather had intelligence, a powerful drive to do good, incredible patience to remain in Africa despite his failure to convert Muslims into Christians, and a willingness to sacrifice himself by living in humble homes beginning with grass huts in Africa and all that time, with very little income to sustain him and my grandmother and later, their young children. I got my drive to accomplish things in life from him.

The second person that I admired, strangely enough, was my own father. Let me get one thing straight however. He was a man you would never want as a father. He planted his seed about the world with indifference to the women he made pregnant. He rarely ever showed up at our home and only after the perseverance of my mother, did he assist on occasion towards the support of her, my brother and me. Despite that, there were three things I really envied him for. He was a fantastic gymnast, a great skier and he was a good pianist. I was proud of him when he performed gymnastic maneuvers, ski jumped off of high ski jumps and played the piano. As a result of watching him doing these things, I later taught gymnastics and ended up playing the piano on stage, on radio and television. I even played the piano on stage once with an incredible showman and pianist, the late Victor Borge. I learned from my father that in order to be good at something, one has to be patient and persevere. Learning to be a gymnast and learning to play the piano certainly is something that demands a great deal of patience and perseverance.

The third person I admired was Ridley Liversidge, a retired sea captain who was eighty years of age when I first met him. I was living with him and his wife in 1946 and 1947 in Nelson, B.C. when I was thirteen and fourteen years of age. When I met them, I asked myself, “What do I have in common with an eighty-year-old man? His wife taught me a great lesson. Never judge a book by its cover. I learned later from them both that when he was 14 years old, he went to sea as a cabin boy in a three-masted schooner that sailed from England to China and back. Ten years later, at the age of only 24, he was appointed as the captain of the then largest passenger liner in the world, the Baltic. In 1912, he was offered the job as Commodore of the entire White Star Line if he accepted the job as the captain of the Titanic. He turned the job down because Ismay who was the owner of the Line insisted that he go non-stop across the Atlantic, even when going through the ice field heading south from New Foundland. Captain Liversidge was willing to sacrifice his career rather that take the Titanic through a dangerous ice field full speed and risk the lives of the passengers and crew. He never captained a ship again. From his story, I understood the significant of sacrificing one’s self for the better good of others. He had hoped that when he told Ismay that he wouldn’t captain the Titanic unless Ismay agreed that he could slow down while going through the ice field; Ismay would agree to those terms. Ismay didn’t agree so Captain Smith captained the ship and we all know what happened when his ship entered the ice field. The Titanic and 1,500 lives were lost. From my years with Captain Liversidge, I had a real understanding of what constituted sacrificing oneself for the good of others.

From these three men, I developed an enquiring and creative mind, a powerful drive to aspire to great things, learn the importance of patience and how to persevere, a willingness to sacrifice myself for the good of others and the intelligence to recognize opportunities when they cropped up before me. But did it do me any good?

Up to 1955, I hadn’t really made my mark anywhere, but then I was only 21 years of age. And then came my first opportunity to do something that would last longer than I would. I was 22 years of age and was a scoutmaster in Vancouver. At that time, we were losing many of our boys to cadets when they turned 14. We had hoped that they would stay in scouts long enough to join Rovers. I was invited to sit on a committee of scoutmasters that had been set up to find a solution to this problem. The committee asked me to be the one to design a scouting organization that would be available to boys fourteen or over who had at least their first class badges. In three months, my proposal was approved by the committee and later by the boys and the commissioners of scouting. As the years went by, the name of the new organization was changed to Venturers and it grew across Canada and then girls joined the organization and then it expanded into nine countries with close to half million boys and girls having been at one time or another, members of Venturers.

My second achievement took place in 1969 and 1970. I was invited by the attorney general of Ontario to head an ad hoc task force to look into the problem of compensating people who were sent to prison and then found innocent. The members of my task force included Ontario legislators, lawyers, law professors, judges, a crown attorney, a former solicitor general of Ontario and a member of the Law Reform Commission of Ontario. I wrote the findings and we recommended that compensation be awarded to innocent persons wrongfully convicted. That became the practice years later.

My third achievement took place in 1971 when I was a guest speaker at a national law conference held in Ottawa. My speech dealt with the need to have 24-hour duty counsel available so that anyone arrested and brought to a police station could speak to a lawyer on the phone free of charge and ask for his advice. Three months later, Ontario Legal Aid made it happen.

My fourth and unquestionably, my greatest achievement took place in 1980 in the city of Caracas, Venezuela while I was speaking at a United Nations crime conference being held in that city. My speech dealt with the need to have a bill of rights created for young offenders. The America delegation upon hearing my speech brought in a resolution, backed by nine countries and approved by all of the delegates of 129 countries attending the conference, that the U.N. conduct studies around the world to study my proposal’s feasibility. Such a bill of rights was drafted up and it was titled, The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules on the Administration of Juvenile Justice. On November 1985, the United Nations General Assembly passed the Rules and those Rules have an effect on the lives of millions of children around the world.

When I attended the U.N. conference in Milan, Italy, in September 1985 that was polishing up the Rules for its final draft and all the delegates approved the final draft, the deputy director of the Justice Branch of the United Nations approached me and shook my hand and said, “No matter what you do for the rest of your life, you will never surpass what you have done for the millions of children in the world who need the protection you have just given them.

It has been said that everyone gets his or her 15 minutes of glory sometime in one’s life. That’s when I got mine. I have tried to describe the feeling I got when the deputy director addressed me in that manner and the delegates standing nearby enthusiastically applauded. I cannot describe it. You have to experience it yourself in order to fully appreciate the feeling.

Strangely enough, a year later, I was depressed until a psychologist friend of mine told me something I never forgot. He said that all the Nobel Prize winners go through the same bouts of depression. The reason being; once you have achieved something that grand, what is there left to achieve? He was right of course and I became my cheerful self again.

If I don’t further achieve anything as grand as what I did in the United Nations, that’s OK. I consider myself fortunate to have had the opportunity to make the proposal that would be accepted by the member nations of the United Nations that would later have an effect on the lives of so many children in the world.

Since 1975, I have given 23 speeches at U.N. conferences around the world and other speeches on behalf of international organizations and some of my other lesser proposals have been adopted resulting in security guards being trained in community colleges, prisoners no longer being subjected to anal searches for drugs, terrorists in some countries being tried by a panel of judges, and in 1975, I had the opportunity to communicate with Arafat, the late leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization through his personal representative at the UN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. He gave his word that the PLO would never again commit any more acts of terrorism in Olympic Games like they did in 1972 in Munich. He kept his promise beginning with the 1976 Olympic Games that was held in Montreal, Canada.

I am at the time of this writing, 74 years of age and obviously in my sunset years. I am now retired and disabled to boot but I am still able to get around with my mind fully intact. I volunteer three to four days a week counseling men in the Toronto Detention Centre. As I look back in my life and cherish my experiences as a private investigator, a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, the editor of two magazines, a television producer and host of a TV talk show, a camp director of three boy’s camps, and many other interesting occupations I have had, I don’t have any regrets.

Life without purpose can be meaningless, of that there is no doubt. The late Princess Leila Pahlavi, formerly of Iran, said it rather well when she said and I quote; "The most important thing is to find yourself, to find a reason for existing, to find a direction in life, a goal." unquote. Unfortunately, despite her great wealth and education, she found no purpose in life and sank into bouts of depression and eating disorders and died an early death on June 17, 2001 at the age of 31.

Adrienne Clarkson, a former Governor General of Canada (1999-2005) when appearing before the graduates of the University of Toronto on June 19, 2001 said in her address: "Mediocrity is safe, very easy and therefore, to be avoided at all costs. The purpose of life, it seems to me, is to leave no one and nothing indifferent. It means taking risks, going down paths that are not approved. It means the possibility of loneliness and isolation. It means, in sum, all that is opposite to mediocrity." She later said; “....if the moral stance you take is that you can change things, that you can effect things, that you do not have to accept the immediate and expedient way, (then) only with this stance can you even vaguely hope to make a difference.” unquote.

I will paraphrase Rick Warren from his book, ‘The Purpose Driven Life’ in which he said in part; “Our unspoken life metaphor influences our lives more than we realize. It determines our expectations, our values, our relationships, our goals and our priorities. For instance, if we think life is a party, our primary value in life will be having fun. If we see it as a race, we will value speed and we will probably be in a hurry all of the time. If we view life as a marathon, we will value endurance. If we see it as a battle or a game, winning will be very important to us.” unquote

My life has been and still is that of an ordinary human being, and like everyone else, I have my own failings, idiosyncrasies, talents, desires and aspirations; but as fate would have it, I just happen to be, on some occasions, given the opportunity to do something special at the right places and at the right times and that's what has made my existence have some significance on the lives of so many of my fellow human beings.

I have however, reached the following conclusions about my own life. I could have been born with a silver spoon in my mouth and lived a carefree life of ease and comfort. But having been born poor, and having to struggle all my life to achieve whatever I did, I eventually learned that the rewards are far more enjoyable when life is lived as a scavenger hunt as apposed to a ongoing birthday party.