I wish I could speak Mandarin as well as Kevin Rudd, and I know that all I’d have to do is pack my bags and move to the mainland, but then I love Hong Kong too much.
I’ve driven a tiny sports car (a 1950s Lotus 7) 21,000km through China (see https://nokiadiscoverchina.peterschindler.com). It was the wildest thing I’ve ever done. Friends asked me what I would do differently if I did something like this again. I say: leave more up to chance. (Some people admire me for being so organised; I wish I was less.)
If I’ve had one talent in my life (at least when I was young), it was driving cars as fast as anyone could (My Racing). But when I was 22, I quit racing: When the going got tough, I didn’t get going. Life presented me with another chance: my current work is as closely connected to my erstwhile talent and passion as I could have hoped for. Then I gave up. This time around, I never will!
Tomorrow is Sunday. We’re having friends over for dinner, that’ll be nice, but I love nothing more than “our” Sunday evenings, that is, spending time with Angie, she cooking, I watching, us chatting, then fruit and cheese and wine and a cigar while watching a movie.
I wish I would more often remember that I am an incredibly fortunate guy.
At the age of twelve I learned how to arc-weld in order to build my own go-cart whose guts came from mopeds that I bought from a wreck yard and disassembled.
I enjoy it when I’ve done something that makes my hands dirty. But then I feel a bit ashamed because I know there are many in this world who would give their lives to do work that wouldn’t dirty their hands. That’s also why I don’t wear torn and beat-up clothes.
I can’t sleep when my nose is stuffed.
When I was 18, right after I got my driving license, I went out many a night with my then best friend to drive – to slither and to slide – along the sinewy, snow-covered mountain roads of Austria. We had a shovel and a torch light with us because more than once we needed to dig the little Renault 5 I had out of meter-high snowdrifts. But I tell you, I haven’t done much in my life that felt so thoroughly exhilarating as those mid-night rallies in the cotton-soft, black-and- white winter landscapes of the Alps all these years ago.
The older I get the more I enjoy life.
I am, more often than I like, torn between “there is such a thing as ‘right’ and ‘wrong'” and “everything is relative”.
For me, there is nothing more exhilarating in the world than driving a car that fits me like a glove on roads that are winding with music that makes my body wanna dance.
One of the most memorable moments in my life was a performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana in New York’s Lincoln Centre.
I have a dream that one day – not any time soon, though – I will be written up in the The Economist’s weekly obituary. Why? Because each one of the lives described in these obituary pages – from the very well known like Muhammad Ali to Prince to those comparatively unknown Harry Wu to Phyllis Schlafly to Qusai Abtini and Marvin Minsky (one of whose courses on AI I attended at M.I.T.) – has led an extraordinary life. Not necessarily a “good” life. Or an “easy” one. But an extraordinary one in the sense that they led their lives as they saw it fit, regardless of what others thought. “Carpe Diem! Seize the Day. Make your life extraordinary!”, as John Keating (Robin Williams) said in the Dead Poet Society.
