Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Working

After a hellish two days in Los Angeles I’ve landed in the Bahamas where I am completely focused on work.

How clever of the Bahamas to encourage foreigners to come here to work, when so many places are shut down. I mean, how hard was that? They’ve even offered a get-around for the normal 90-day visa, and as always—no taxes. Just a $40 business permit and I’m fully functional.

Surely Daddy will be impressed when I tell him. Except he’ll likely remind me of the already sunk costs of setting up in California… and the taxes, and the income taxes and property taxes and energy prices and well…Hmm. At least I’m still a British subject and don’t have to pay income tax on monies earned outside the country, as the Americans do. I’ll remind him of that.

Truth be told, I’ve really been ignoring my business. Of course there has been the pandemic and the lack of well… business, but that can’t stop me from working on new business development. And work is what I am here to do.

It all starts with the work ethic.

I’ve contacted my web developer to completely revamp my website. In the current circumstances, some changes needed to be made. Out of compassion I should no longer market solutions to “fulfilment in one’s social life,” because right now there is no social life, or “dissatisfaction at work”—because there is no work, or “anxiety”—because well—not everyone has my innate ability to de-stress… and I can’t really teach that on Zoom.

Instead, I’m going to focus solely on executive and leadership coaching; it’s where I do my best work and execs are not stupid enough to believe that stress can be explained away in an executive’s life.

I thought first to focus on those who support the things that matter to me, and at the top of that list is my beloved planet. I was always planning to attend the World Economic Forum in Singapore anyway. It’s the continuation from January in Davos, which then got pushed to early May, and then to later in May, and now to August—which gives me more time to work with prospective clients. The question is which clients? I can’t find any list of speakers so I decided to ring Daddy to break the log-jam.

“Hiding, likely,” was his response to my question about where I might find the prospective speakers.

“Moving forward…” I continued, “How might I find them if I really need to?”

“Just google 'billionaires opposed to capitalism'.”

Why is this man smiling?

Ugh! Same old Daddy. I waited a moment because I knew he wouldn’t keep this up when his darling girl needed help. Finally I heard him clicking away on his own computer.

“Here we are… look up 'black soldier fly larvae or protein-rich maggots'," he said.

“Daddy!”

“Don’t daddy me, I’m already doing your work for you. If you look— you will find a company called Insectta that is selling insect biomaterial for pharmaceuticals, semi-conductors, and pet food.”

“OMG—NO! NO WAY I could deal with that.” I said, and which was the response he had to expect.

“Don’t be so unreasonable…” He continued. “This is right up your alley… it says trays of writhing larvae in residential neighbourhoods… so you see people don’t even have to commute to work -- score one for the environment!”

“Please stop! I’m getting creeped out.”

“Fine then…what about this?” He said, not even trying to disguise his delight.

"Fake Chicken! Who doesn’t like fake chicken? And It’s called 'clean meat' …grown from animal muscle cells, so not exactly vegan but sort of Frankenstein meat—and it specifically says here it does not come from slaughtered animals. It must be so much more humane… to take muscle cells from living chickens.”

Dodged that bullet!

“Fine. Send me the link please,” was all I could manage. Sometimes he’s impossible. But it was a good tip since the website was completely secretive about who was speaking and about what. I know the WEF is by invitation only but a little marketing wouldn’t hurt.

In an attempt to cast a wider net I did google “global reset” but every single link was to Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab. Somehow they’d commandeered the entire World Wide Web. Even Al Gore was out of the headlines.

I was all the way back to page 24… still Bill and Klaus. So I decided to look for trends. If I could find their past focus, I might be able to figure out where they were headed. Finally I was able to locate some of the past themes, there was “Shaping the Post-Crisis World” (2009, even though it sounded like 2021). “Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild” (2010—but again sounded like 2021), “The Great Transformation”(2012), and “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World” (2018).

Granted, I hadn’t attended any of these but they sounded all the same as the current: “Global Risks, Fractured Futures” (2021). I refused to buy into Daddy’s assertion that it was just the same old fear doctrine, recycled every single year, even if it did sound like that was the case.

Well, I had to track down the fake chicken CEO, which was admittedly created with “very high production costs” because in the end, work is work, and a girl’s gotta eat.