We are the children we always were...

Analyze yourself in all honesty - do you think you have 'grown' or even 'matured'?

I haven't.

Between age 7 and 68 I had a life; and it was one that wasn't really boring or monotonous, to sum it up.

I have seen things, done things, done many stupid things, especially when it came to managing my own affairs. However, professionally I wasn't too bad.

For instance, I always told my private banking clients: "Invest only in stuff that you fully understand."

Unfortunately, I myself didn't follow that very sound advice which is why I lost about half of my lifetime savings in a matter of less than 6 months. I relied on the investment recommendations of smart private bankers - and got screwed over. And that happened only recently...

The problem is that nobody in the international banking industry, not even the sophisticated top investment bankers wearing dark blue pin-striped designer suits had the slightest notion of the risks they were supposed to manage. Inevitably, this leads to a basic question: Isn't risk management what banking is all about?

Who said you get 'wiser' as you age?... That is a whole pile of BS, and is only true of the very few people who were already wise when they were young.

The most frequent question I heard from my wife during our marriage of 33 years is: "Zewulf - when will you finally mature?"

A former colleague of mine, a real asshole but probably a really wise asshole by now, wrote me only a few days ago, literally: "You ludicrous dickhead still behave like a 18 year old one - grow up!!"

Maybe the wise asshole and my patient wife have got a point after all.... :-).

Anyway.

What I wanted to say is that it is the early impressions that mark us for life.

At age six I already had four passions that never left me: Women (appropriately, they were four or five years old back then), diving, drawing, and sharks.

While I love and admire women to this day, even if they are a few years younger than myself, and drawing eventually made way to photography, my passion for diving and sharks stayed with me all these years, pretty much unchanged.

Here is the proof:

John Wayne fighting a giant octopus (1947)

Mako Shark (1948)