Not all journeys are straight lines: my first time teaching… at McGill

I haven’t posted in over a month, partially because I’ve continued my physiotherapy rehab since injuring myself at a soccer tournament in Dubai back in October, but mainly because I immersed myself in preparing for a course I am giving this semester at McGill. I have been posting the lectures on ContextTV, but will embed them here with a bit more context on each course. Here’s a link to the playlist.

Back in 1999, I was a student at Concordia’s John Molson School of Business. I never really cared about grades, until my final semester in a joint MBA/BCom course called Management of Financial Institutions. The course topic wasn’t instrumental, I finally felt compelled to compete because of the joint nature of the course. My group delivered a class project on Long Term Capital Management, and we went on to earn an A. What struck me was my teacher in the course, Dr Khaled Soufani, who today lectures at Cambridge but was a star professor at Concordia. I’d been his student a year earlier in the introductory Markets class, but this last semester course was something else. Yes, I’m a finance geek at heart. In any case, in his first lecture, I recall him saying how he was a former trader, but he’d gotten burnt out. I didn’t understand how that felt, but I could empathize it, as I was working 22 hours per week at the bank while completing my studies, with a full course load. In any case, in some ways, soccer – and cooking, traveling, writing – were just some of the ways I managed to avoid burnout working some 70+ hours per week for the past 17 years, since launching WatchMojo. I’m using the class to help the students take a product or service from concept to reality, but also preparing them for the mental, emotional and physical toll that entrepreneurship entails. Stay tuned, as the class lectures are 60-minutes long, I’ll use this forum to break down each class.