Page 269 - James Caan - The Real Deal

26 · What Now?

time in my life I wondered if it was the right time to undertake the
hajj to Mecca. If the girls had been a little older, we would
probably have gone that year.
The girls were starting to think about what university they would
go to after leaving school. They were both Oxbridge standard, and I
was excited to see how they would flourish at university, which
made me realise that if I had one regret – if there was one thing I felt I
had missed out on – it was that I hadn’t been to university myself. To
have those years finding out about yourself, to push yourself
intellectually, was an opportunity not to be missed. As I talked to
the girls about their options, I realised that I now had the
opportunity finally to go to university myself. This was a really
intriguing possibility, but what would I study and where would I go?
Should I completely retrain? Could I, for example, become a
lawyer? I had enough experience of contract law by this stage. Was
that something I could become really good at? Or would I like to
do English or History? I started making lists of all the possibilities
and then began to narrow the field. The first thing I realised was
that I wasn’t prepared to study for three or four years to get a
qualification that I wouldn’t use. That meant studying something
to do with business, and the obvious option was to do an MBA.
So, Iasked myself, if I was to do an MBA where would I like to
study? The top three places in the world to study for an MBA are
INSEAD in France, the London Business School and Harvard.
INSEAD pretty much eliminated itself as I had been told that
unless you speak fluent French it’s hard to get the most out of it.
The London Business School is in Regent’s Park, which is about
five minutes from my house, so even though I was really impressed
with the course and facilities there, it wouldn’t have given me the
opportunity to experience university life, as I’d still see all the same
friends in the evening. So that left Harvard.
Everyone at YPO agreed that the business school at Harvard
was probably the best place in the world to study, so I looked into

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