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What Growing Up in Shaolin Taught Me About Survival, Leadership, and Community


In From Grit to Glory, I use my stories to tell the readers how I have managed to rise out of the Jamaican ghetto of Shaolin to senior managerial positions in international engineering companies. However, not very long before I sat in a boardroom or led a large team, I was taught by Shaolin the basics of survival, leadership, and community. The things that I learnt there, were not taught in the books; it was embedded in the day-to-day activities. My personality has been formed in a setting characterized by strength and solidarity, which has continued to shape my character to this day.

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Shaolin was an extraordinary place, a place that was misunderstood by the outsiders. It was also a childhood of poverty, cramped houses and low opportunities but strength, creativity and togetherness. The struggles were genuine and the struggles were incessant yet they developed a culture of people knowing how to make it through with ingenuity and support to one another.

To survive in Shaolin one should be able to adapt. We were not well equipped hence we used what we had to improvise. I was taught to think on my feet and use few resources to solve problems as a child. A lesson into resource management and strategic planning was the selling of boxes drinks or farming callaloo, something as simple as that. Focus, hard work, and being capable of recovering after being beaten back was what was necessary to survive in such an environment.

Another skill that Shaolin taught me even before I knew it is leadership. Leadership was not a matter of position or honor but it was a matter of service, accountability and power. People were relying on me when I started my little businesses selling bag juice and June plums. My friends and classmates demanded a certain degree of consistency and quality. Even my teenage barber company had an aspect of leadership; I had to manage time, treat the clients with respect and have them trust me. To be a leader in Shaolin was to demonstrate to people that you were dependable even when you had nothing much to spare.

Shaolin as a community had a significant influence on my values. People were supportive to each other despite the misery. Families used to eat together, neighbors were in need of one another and children were raised with the glaring gaze of a whole community. I also experienced acts of kindness that demonstrated to me the value of unity. This group identity shaped my perception of group work and collaboration at the workplace. In the University of the West indies or my subsequent work in American engineering firms I realized that success does not happen to a person, it is constructed through teamwork, appreciation and mutual mission.

Among the greatest teachings of Shaolin was that in the hard times. I observed that people were laid off, got sick or were poor, yet they never gave up. That hope even when there was a bad situation influenced the way I dealt with my personal problems- particularly when my motorbike crashed and changed my life. The mental and physical toughness that I had developed in Shaolin assisted me to overcome the painful healing time.

The presence of Shaolin did not just stop in my childhood and it also became a part of my journey in the world. The flexibility I had acquired in growing up became my best asset when I relocated to Jamaica to Trinidad and finally to London and the United States. Every new environment was associated with its problems: culture shock, discrimination, financial strain, and confusion. Yet the survival instincts and leadership qualities I acquired at the ghetto were able to adapt me, and I carried on and ultimately, I made it to the heights of engineering career. These early experiences assisted me in my style of team management, solving problems and being sophisticated in that I remained down to earth irrespective of how high up I went.

Being raised in Shaolin taught the writer that hardship can never make a person, it will only equip him. It taught me that a leader should serve and community is the basis of resilience. The experiences that I had acquired in that small, neglected neighborhood helped to take me through my most difficult moments and the most successful ones.


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