Deborah Hill Cone: Your way? It's the only way

Oh hullo! There you are. It's been so long. You don't ring, you don't write, you don't call. So much to catch up on. Course, there are the actual business events of the past month or so: Wall St jitters, land tax, Sir Doug Myers finally knighted after years of everyone calling him Sir anyhow. But, weirdly, everyone seems to like reading about my rackety personal life more than my take on the bond market.

Kevin Roberts would concur: feelings are often more important than facts.

Anyway, my life post-separation jitterbugs on. My 2-year-old son with language delay is getting proper therapy and said "tractor" the other day. My 5-year-old daughter likes everything gross, creepy and scary. Her favourite Christmas present was a remote-controlled tarantula. Weirdo. Like mother, like daughter.

Actually, it is kind of lucky I couldn't write this column over the Christmas break. I went to quite a dark place. There was this particular woe-is-me moment - nah, I'll spare you that. Self-pity is so unattractive. And it's all about fear really. Fear of being alone. Fortunately I had someone to tell me to stop being a drip and pull myself together. Now I know not to take it all so seriously. As the Indigo Girls put it: "Well darkness has a hunger that's insatiable, And lightness has a call that's hard to hear." Well, I have come into the light. You have to focus on what you do have and can do.

It's the same for everything, even the media. The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said this week: "If you think about journalism, not business models, you can become rather excited about the future. If you only think about business models you can scare yourself into total paralysis."

And the future is bright. Hell, next week I am going to see AC/DC. We could all learn a lot from that cartoonish Australian rock band. Like, it's a long way to the shop when you want a sausage roll. But mainly, don't listen too much to what other people say. After being ridiculed for years, AC/DC made an album in 2008 which sounded like all their other work and was praised across the board as a masterpiece of consistency.

"For the first time in 20 years a band who'd been derided for doing just one thing was championed for doing just that. What had been called a lack of imagination for two decades was suddenly being lauded as uncompromising integrity," wrote Anthony Bozza in Why AC/DC Matters.

We are constantly being told to be sensitive to what other people want. To be customer-focused and flexible and meeting the needs people didn't even know they had. With all due respect: stuff that. I like what motivational coach Michael Neill calls the "strangest discipline in the world".

This is not the usual stuff you read in self-help books. It is about being tough enough to do what you want. "Being disciplined enough to not do what you don't want to do even if everyone around you (and that voice inside your head) is telling you that you should."

This is the discipline of trusting yourself - of consistently choosing your inner knowing over outer knowledge. This is the kind of thinking that keeps your kids from doing drugs and makes companies stick to what they know in the face of widespread opprobrium. Those great philosophers AC/DC understood this, too. "Death before compromise."

- dhc@deborahhillcone.com