All Posts Tagged With: "james orbinski"
George W. Bush: Lost in Translation?
Some interviews, word-for-word, can come across as ill-formed, awkward and vague
I was recently looking over a composite by the BBC of all George W. Bush’s worst “slip-ups” over the last eight-plus years. There are all the famous ones, most of which featured in Michael Moore’s famous movie. We learn that the human being and fish should coexist peacfully, that a saying in Texas is “Fool me, you won’t fool me again” and so on. It got me thinking.
While we were interviewing features for Kickstart: How Successful Canadians Got Started, we figured the best approach was to record each interview, so that we would be able to look over entire transcripts when writing a profile. What we learned was that, if you take, word for word, what someone has spoken and present it to the reader, it comes across as ill-formed, awkward and vague. So much in conversation is communicated through tone, gesture and an implicit understanding with the listener. All of this is lost in text.
When writing Kickstart, we needed to make sure the profiles were readable. That was our first priority. It involved a lot of editing, caressing, rewriting. (To avoid putting words in our interviewees’ mouths, we always made sure to show them the final copies to make sure we weren’t inventing anything – and they always signed off) Had we presented the mere interview transcripts, some of the most articulate people we interviewed (Hon. John Godfrey, James Orbinski, Lynda Haverstock, among many others) would never have comes across as well as they did in person.
All this to say that, perhaps, many of the best-loved Bushisms of the past era were often the result of a simple transcription. His message may (may) have been better expressed in person, to his audience. I urge everyone to be careful before passing judgment on someone based on a one or two-line quote read in the media. Often times, it lacks that great, important element known as “context.”
Searching with intent
How James Orbinski, head of Dignitas International, found that something
As hordes of unwashed young people (including Kickstart’s very own Alex Herman) dust off their lunch boxes, don their squeaky new jeans, and head back to school this week, and the nation’s newspapers run their all-too-predictable pieces on how parents can survive their little angels’ first year of high school, university, or college, I thought it appropriate to deposit my two to four cents and raise that ever-neglected question: what’s all this education stuff really about anyway?
The question brings to mind something James Orbinski, the head of Dignitas International, told me when we were putting Kickstart together. Orbinski’s early education and experiences meant that, even as a boy, he was highly attuned to his social responsibilities. He was a bright and curious kid with a desire to do good – a kid who was looking for answers.
When he attempted to complete his CEGEP, Orbinski left school twice: first to try to establish a hotel with some friends in the Laurentians, and later to travel west across the country.
When he finally got to university (the University of Trent), he took every course on offer, believing that subjecting himself to the full gamut would ensure not only that he was a better-rounded, well-informed, and more fully engaged person, but that he stood a better chance of being struck by something – a passion, a calling, something.
At first, the thing that struck him was psychology. When a less than marvelous post-university job disabused him of that idea, he gravitated to medicine. Finally, on a trip to Rwanda (a trip that most of his cohorts warned him not to go on for career reasons), Orbinski discovered that something. And his life has never been the same.
James Orbinski describes the action he was engaged in during his high school travels and his bachelors degree as “searching with intent.” He was throwing himself at every possible possibility – at every school of thought, at every opportunity to live and learn.
He wasn’t following a road map through his life and studies, but he wasn’t sitting on a friend’s grungy chesterfield waiting for inspiration either (though I’m sure he saw his fair share of grungy chesterfields). He was engaging with the world around him.
As I remember my first week of university – arriving in a wholly alien country, scared silly by everyone from the owl-eyed professors to the doe-eyed girls – I can’t help but wish someone had put Orbinski’s words and example before me.
“You’re a searcher, son. Go out there and find your something…”
On Starting Out
When we first started the interviews that eventually led to Kickstart: How Successful Canadians Got Started, we didn’t really know what to expect. Wouldn’t it be difficult to sit down with so many well-known people, especially considering the three of us were literary nobodies? We had no publisher, no agent and very little experience (I [...]
When we first started the interviews that eventually led to Kickstart: How Successful Canadians Got Started, we didn’t really know what to expect. Wouldn’t it be difficult to sit down with so many well-known people, especially considering the three of us were literary nobodies?
We had no publisher, no agent and very little experience (I think we were still listing work on the high school yearbook in our credits). Why would anyone have twenty minutes – let alone two hours – to talk about their twenties, that awkward, often-forgotten time in their lives.
But we persevered… something like that. Actually, a great deal of the success in “bagging” over seventy interviews came from luck, pure and simple. We happened to be calling at the right time or some assistant was interested in offering a PR-motivated interview (not knowing, of course, that we still didn’t have a publisher).
But co-author Andrew Feindel, as someone who takes great pride in the skill-set offered to him by one of the most respected business schools in
All this to say that Paul Matthews and I, the more – ahem – artsy guys of the group (we both have BA’s in History and English), would have been completely hopeless when it came to logistics.
Having a business side works. Even when it comes to writing books.
