Shibboleths for the Weak

Management is obsessed with the word Learning. It's the correct thing to say when you sit with your boss for a "so how are you finding it" review. You're learning because you get to see cross-functional conflict. You're learning because of hostile accounts, friendly accounts, failed negotiations, pricing mistakes, presentations unprepared for. You're "learning" because of pressure and tight deadlines and high expectations; you're "excited" and "thrilled" and "bullish" about the coming quarter. But when you discuss work with a friend in office you've left the shibboleths for a sputtering of four-letter words or their more vibrant Hindi cousins.

My lad, learning is your return, from the time that you invest in something. Okay, since money's there too let's say we quantify learning and money both, and that that's the return on time invested, RoTI. Now a simple question for the sham of learning that your job gives you, which is wringing the blood and marrow out of what was once a bright-eyed boy on a parrot-green tricycle, making engine noises with a toothless smile past mum's kitchen: what about the opportunity cost of learning? What about all the chapters you never wrote, the music you never learnt, the brush never put to canvas, because your affair with duties gave you learning? What if you die in an accident next Monday? Where will you account for that from, from the knot in your grandfather's lungi or what?