DIANA’S CAREER PREPARATION.

DIANA’S CAREER PREPARATION. Kids, I know that you and your friends are very much concerned with preparations for careers. I think the following shows how helpful it is to think about what is actually required for a job (the example sometimes given by human relations specialists is that “salesman” is an overly broad term because selling involves a variety of skill sets depending on products and customers). Anyway, in his interesting review of Tina Brown’s biography of Princess Diana, John Lanchester had an insight about Diana that had never occurred to me: “She graduated with no O levels, having failed the exams, twice. O levels were the exams that British children took at sixteen, and for someone in a private school to fail all of them twice is, in its way, a remarkable achievement, rarer and more difficult than passing one or two, or, indeed, than getting twelve A’s. To fail on that scale was either to be astoundingly stupid—which Diana clearly wasn’t—or to have some other plan.” The key word is “plan.” I think others besides Lanchester had noted Diana’s insight that virginity might be a trump card in seeking to be a future Queen, but for Diana to have realized that an avoidance of learning could also be a great advantage shows real strategic imagination.