Once upon a time I, the business consultant hat on, visited ~250 breweries of beer in China and 1 in the Philippines, and now I see similarities between between making beer and producing gold, in that they both involve vats, ingredients, and quality vs production time.
Both processes are 'easy' at the very basic level, in that we are not talking rocket science. However both also require a lot of know-how, to get 'just' right, affecting taste in beer and yield in gold.
At the end of the production the similarities end, jarringly, since beer requires marketing, sales, logistics, and more marketing, and yummy varieties, whereas gold requires suit case, counting, and hiding, and absolute sameness.
Between the two business activities, gold is much easier except for finding. After that, I say, pour on the cyanide, chuck in the burnt coconut shells (activated charcoal), more cyanide, and stir, followed by burning, melting, and counting.
There were two business activities I enjoyed doing greatly, the development of a resort in 1989 on Boracay, Philippines, and the restart of a gold mill in 2014 in Queensland, Australia. The beer work just added weight to me, where as the resort allowed me to play architect, write project briefs, organise brochures, and the gold allowed me to play roughing-it geology, albeit based at a marina hotel in Cairns, and learn about gold, from fascinating history of gold (a/k/a history of human existence) to the technicals of how to try and get gold out of different situations, whether it be geological or social political, or paper constructs.
I was trained as an electrical engineer (antennae, quantum & optical, computer structures) and finance type (soft bs marketing, hard option pricing), and what I studied led me to conclude the former is hard, and not so interesting, whereas the latter was useless unless one puts back of hand to top of forehead.
I think I would have enjoyed studying geology.
I have always found two questions challenging, "where are you from?" and "what do you do?". Simplest answer is the same in both cases, "I am not sure".
:0)
I love Sundays during quarantine. It is a lot like Monday. |
