Life is busy and life is complex, with many choices, big and small, to make in every hour of every day.

At times, I have to think about a moment which can bring the best out of me. I have to settle this moment I have to choose the softest experience of my life to fix myself. I throw myself back to when I was a child, where I learned kindness, love of self and compassion. This thought takes me back to the person I was in that moment and it reminds me that true love of self comes from a deep and unconditional love you give to others without expecting anything in return. It was filtered through my breakfast with my parents. We use to have a beggar who came every day when we were having early breakfast and my mother would make breakfast for him. I would feel really angry – why do we have to make him breakfast every day? We spoiled him, now everyday he comes and sits outside the house and expects breakfast. She would say; “be compassionate and feel for others. Help them without expecting anything in return. Experience the feeling. it actually profits you before it profits them”. I didn’t experience this feeling until I had grown up and now when I am feeling a sense of unease I try to help someone and it actually profits me before it profits them.

Many years later I was working as a lawyer in a very large and privately held company in London. I had been there for about five years and I was enjoying the work but wondering whether to stay in the business or move on. One of the aspects of the company that bothered me and also intrigued me was that I didn’t know who I was working for. There was a board of directors and there was a CEO, but everybody knew that the real power in the business was with the Chairman, and nobody except the CEO ever met the chairman. There was a name but apparently no face, and no amount of google searches could reveal anything about our mysterious chairman, where he lived, what he looked like, where he studied, whether he had a family.

What was perhaps more intriguing was that our company had an incredibly diverse portfolio of businesses across Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa. We grew tobacco and coffee in South America, we managed airports all over the world, we made cosmetics in Europe and pharmaceuticals in Pakistan. We owned secretive private security companies which had been involved, so my colleagues said, in toppling several regimes in Africa. In a world where business orthodoxy said you should focus on your core business it seemed that we had no core business, but we were generating enormous amounts of cash and were quietly one of the largest companies in Europe. It seemed though that none of this cash was heading my way.

It was a bitterly cold January day and I was rushing to work I had run out of things for breakfast at home and I called into a bakery and bought a croissant and a pain au raisin, and a latte (extra hot) to have at my desk. It was January 15th and I was two weeks from payday. I had just spent the last of the money in my bank account on breakfast.

I was about 500 meters from my office and glanced into an alleyway that a cat had just darted into. There was a huddled figure sitting there amidst the snow, shivering. I shook my head and kept walking. Somehow though I couldn’t shake off this image of the huddled and hooded figure in the snow and after a minute or so I turned back towards the alleyway. When I got back the figure was still there and the cat was there, and now I could see a small dog. I tentatively approached the figure, clearing my throat as politely as I could. When the person in the snow looked up I discovered that I had been looking at a woman in her 70’s with bright blue eyes and long grey hair. The cat looked at me suspiciously and the dog wagged his tail.

“You must be cold” I said, stating the obvious. The woman smiled a tired smile and said good morning.

“I thought you might like a pastry” I ventured.

“That’s so kind, but I can’t eat your breakfast” she smiled.

“Oh, don’t worry about that, I’ve been trying to lose weight” I lied. “I was tempted by the bakery but now I’m feeling I should just have some fruit when I get to work” I lied again.

The woman gladly accepted the pain au raisin.

I smiled and started to turn away and then the thought came to me that she needed a hot drink in the bitter cold.

“I’m going to have tea with my fruit in work” I lied again. “would you like some coffee?”.

The woman with the grey hair gladly accepted the coffee, wrapping her almost blue fingers around the paper cup to warm them.

She started to break off small pieces of the pain au raisin to feed the dog and cat.

Irritation started to rise in me, the same irritation I used to feel with my mother when she fed the beggar. “She’s not seriously going to feed my breakfast to her pets?!” The feeling quickly subsided.

“Here, you’d better take this for yourself” I smiled as I handed her my precious croissant.

My reward was the most radiant smile I had ever seen. I smiled back and headed back up the alleyway with feet like mini glaciers.

A man was standing in the entrance to the alleyway. He had apparently been watching us. I guessed that he was around forty-five years old. He was well dressed, expensively but discretely, in a blue covert coat and a grey fedora hat. His shoes shone like they had been polished by the world shoe polishing champion. His eyes wrinkled as I walked past and he moved slowly across to the woman. I hesitated for a second, just long enough to see them start to speak. I could see from their body language that they knew each other and were happy to see each other.

As I walked to the office I started to compose my resignation letter. My boss was due back from vacation in a week. I had just decided that I had had enough of working for a faceless company that paid me so little that I couldn’t get half way through the month on my salary.

The week flew by and suddenly it was Monday and I was walking into my boss’s office with my resignation letter clutched in my hand. I hadn’t actually requested the meeting, my boss (who barely knew my name) had called me to his office an hour after arriving back from his skiing holiday.

“You know, we have been paying attention recently to the work you do here. It is excellent” He looked uncomfortable, which didn’t really fit what he was saying. Was he going to throw in a “but” somewhere?

“I’m happy to tell you”, he said, not looking entirely happy, “that you are being promoted to the position of Legal Affairs Director”.

“All the details are in this letter” he said. “You will move to the office beside mine tomorrow”.

I thanked him and said things I can’t remember, I was so shocked. As I got up to leave he motioned to the resignation letter still clutched in my hand – “is that for me?”.

“No, no, it’s for a client” I lied hurriedly as I headed for the shredder with my resignation letter in one hand and my promotion letter in the other.

The resignation letter safely shredded, I returned to my desk and opened the promotion letter, detailing my new package. My salary more than doubled, admission to the fabled company profit share scheme and a company car. Apparently, I had to make a difficult choice between a BMW, Audi, Mercedes or Jaguar. It seemed that my trusty Nissan Altima was going to get an early pension.

I sat at my desk and tried to take it all in. This was a big change. In one letter, I had been pole vaulted four grades up the company ladder and put in a position where I could have croissants every morning and not even think about the cost. But why?

The next morning, I was walking to work in the now-slushy snow. Snow never sits for long in London. I had breakfasted at home but bought a coffee and a pain au chocolate for the beggar. I got to her alleyway and found that she already had company, the distinguished gentleman from yesterday, and she was happily drinking from a steaming cup and munching what looked like a sandwich. I thought about waiting but they seemed to be laughing and joking, so I made my way to the office and to my desk to eat the pain au chocolate and drink the coffee myself.

I found my desk devoid of me and anything connected to me. Either a desperate gang of desk robbers had broken in during the night, or somebody had moved my things to my new office. I walked across the floor to my new office, meeting on the way my peers, who by the stroke of a pen were now reporting to me. From their congratulations, some sincere, some less sincere, it seemed that the word was on the street.

My things were packed in document boxes scattered around my new office. My name was on the door. A bowl full of fruit sat on my meeting room table.

As I was unpacking my boxes my boss arrived. Never a man of many words he smiled and sat down across from me.

“There is a village” he said, “about seventy-five kilometers from Lahore”.

“They haven’t had a reliable water supply for years, and as a consequence the two communities in the village have been in dispute over water, and knocking seven bells out of each other for longer than anyone can remember”.

He paused, giving me time to internally voice the obvious question; “and what has this got to do with me?”.

“Your flight leaves tonight. We want you to fix it. Budget is £500,000, but we can stretch to a million if needs be. Tell the local officials we don’t pay bribes. Buy them dinner in a fancy restaurant. If any of them get too sticky, invite them for an expense- paid visit to London”

He smiled, “Get some sleep on the flight, an engineer is meeting you in the airport to discuss the project”.

I arrived in Lahore surprisingly refreshed having been cosseted by British Airways first class. The engineer was there, a Pakistani engineer working for a large Swedish firm.

And thus, began my new life. I delivered the project in three months and to budget. The communities continued to fight, I suspect that deep down they enjoyed it, but they had a reliable source of clean water.

My boss was very pleased. I settled into my new role, leading and mentoring my team and to my surprise drawing on the experiences from Lahore.

Life was flying by. I now drove to work in my new BMW, but I stopped most mornings to deliver breakfast to “my beggar”, who had a name, Julia, and a remarkable talent for writing six-line poems. Never five, never seven. Six.

Apart from my usual caseload, my clients and my team, every few months a “new project” would drop onto my desk.

“There is a democracy campaigner in Hong Kong that we would like to get out of jail”.

“There is a community in Brazil which is being poisoned by a mine which has been opened on their land”.

“There is an inventor, a designer of a new type of solar panel, who needs support in commercializing his invention”.

I soon realized that I had been tasked with this work in isolation from the rest of the business. It was all done discretely and correctly, and I was the only one doing this type of work

Why had I been selected for this? I had no idea whatsoever, but I loved my job, and every year I got promoted and got a new boss. I really had no worries about the cost of croissants. I had bought a nice apartment in Acton, on Churchfield Road., near a Greek cafe which served amazing crepes.

Four years later and four promotions later and I was reporting directly to the CEO.

A few months into my new position and I was invited to a meeting with the CEO. I arrived to find Adrian was also there. Adrian was the head of the “private security” business within the company which we heard so little about.

“There is a small country we are quite interested in, in a rather pretty corner of South America. “El Presidente” is particularly unpleasant. We would like him to be “re-assigned”. Regime change. Democracy. Budget unlimited. Try not to get innocent people hurt in the process”

“You want me to overthrow a government?!”

The CEO smiled; “We like to think of it as assistance, Adrian will be your man on the ground”

A week later we were landing in Buenos Aires and meeting a military contractor who was to work with us in this project to remove the leader of a small neighboring country.

This was my longest, hardest and definitely most dangerous project, and of course discretion prevents me from going into detail, but as always, I delivered. I had come a long way from the nervous young lawyer who couldn’t afford a pastry for breakfast.

It wasn’t as difficult as I had imagined. When “El Presidente” is this vicious and unpredictable there are many people around him who want to follow a different path, my job was to walk down the path with them and assist in every way.

I returned to London and took a few days break. Got my hair done, got my nails done, read a lot, caught up with friends, and then back to work.

On my way, I stopped for coffee and a Chocolate donut. Julia preferred a lighter breakfast in the summertime. I was looking forward to reading her latest poem. To my dismay she wasn’t there. I shrugged my shoulders, I would catch her tomorrow.

When I arrived, my PA was looking flustered; “The CEO would like to see you, urgently”.

I walked up to the CEO’s office on the 19th floor. He was relaxed and smiling.

“Come with me, someone wants to meet you”.

We walked over to an elevator that I had never noticed before. It was located on the other side of the building to the other elevators. It had only three buttons; Parking, 19 and 20.

The CEO inserted a key into a panel and pressed button 20, the door closed and a few seconds later we stepped out into a light, bright and positively enormous office which seemed to cover the entire 20th floor. As I took in the view a man was getting up from a sofa and walking towards us. Actually, not just any man, the man who also gave breakfast to Julia, and there, sitting on the sofa was Julia.

To say this was confusing would be to greatly understate my emotions. I was being invited to sit, offered tea and coffee.

The man began to speak. “I am Ernesto Claro, the Chairman of the company, and this is my mother, Julia”.

When I was a child my mother told me very often not to stand with my mouth open, “a wasp might fly in”. I think that I momentarily forgot my mother’s instruction and sat there slack jawed.

“Let me explain everything” said the Chairman.

“My name is Ernesto Claro, I arrived in the UK with my parents when I was two. I grew up here and I anglicised my name to fit in better. Ernest Clear. Hence the company name – Clear & Clear”.

“We come originally from the country in South America you have just been assisting. My mother was a writer and my father was a Professor in Political Science at the University. “El Presidente” overthrew the government in the year I was born and my father, naturally a reserved man, overcame his natural reserve and became a fairly vocal critic of the new regime”

Julia spoke for the first time in what I now understood to be a South American-Spanish accent; “We were having dinner one night when there was a knock on the front door. Outside were a number of soldiers and amongst them one of my husband’ oldest friends, a Colonel in the army. He came in, leaving the soldiers outside. He had come, at some risk to himself to tell us that we were to be rounded up the next morning, with other “dissidents” and sent to a “re-education camp”. This is another way of describing one of the new torture camps El Presidente had established. A fishing boat was waiting in the harbor to bring us down the coast to Argentina, from where we would fly to London the next day. There was no discussion and no argument, we understood what we had to do. We packed small bags and went straight to the port”.

The Chairman continued; “We came to London and my father took up a teaching job, still writing and talking to anyone who would listen about the terrible transformation of our country”

“When I was still a teenager, thirty years ago, on the 6th of June 1986, my father was driving to work. He didn’t get to work. Beside the alleyway where my mother sits, his car was crushed by a truck. The truck had been stolen and the driver sped off on the back of a motorcycle”.

Julia interrupted; “The driver was never found, no evidence was found. We believe, and so do the police, that my husband was killed by agents from our country, but it cannot be proven. I have gone every day for thirty years and sat in that alley, trying somehow to be close to the man I love”

“Is this why all your poems have six lines, because he died on the 6th day of the 6th month?”, I asked.

I saw again the sad smile I had sometimes seen before. “Yes, it’s true”.

Ernesto took up the story again.

“I was fifteen, my father had died, my mother was overcome with grief. My older sister helped me finish my secondary schooling. I earned a place at Manchester, reading Economics. I focused only on study. When I graduated I went into the city, into stockbroking, and focused only on making money. By the age of twenty-five I had a million pounds in the bank. I set up my own investment company and set about building the group of companies I own today. I named the company Clear & Clear in memory of my father.

The money you know, it is nice to have, but it is only a means to an end. I wanted to create opportunities to change the lives of people in small ways, money provides the means to do that”

I was struggling to take all of this information on board. The CEO sat and drank his coffee. Julia smiled gently.

“As well as money and power there needs to be a will to make change happen. I went to see my mother every day, I still do. I bring her breakfast because she goes to that alleyway very early in the morning and goes home when it gets dark”

This was a surprise to me, it seemed that my beggar wasn’t actually a beggar and she had a home to go home to. I was quietly delighted.

“Five years ago, I saw you give coffee and pastries to my mother. I saw you do it almost every day. I had been looking for someone in my organization that I could trust to run my “special projects”. I understood when I saw those small acts of unconditional kindness that I had found that person. Those projects have been your apprenticeship, each one more demanding, each one more complex, until finally I sent your biggest project to you, the removal of El Presidente”.

“Tomorrow is a big day for all of us. My mother and I fly home to our country for a week. We want to scatter my father’s ashes in the lake where my parents used to go and swim when they were young. Because of this new government in our country it is now safe for us to go home.

James, my long-suffering CEO is very nearly at retirement age and I am releasing him tomorrow, a few months early so that he can devote himself entirely to playing golf.

We have been searching for a worthy successor to James.

We have a tradition that only the CEO knows me. Only the CEO has access to my office. Only the CEO has a key to the elevator you came up in”

For the first time, the CEO spoke.

“Nicoletta, here is your key, a new key for a new CEO”

It turns out that my mother was right;

“Be compassionate and feel for others. Help them without expecting anything in return. Experience the feeling. it actually profits you before it profits them”