Ten years ago, I was sitting alone late at night in my office, wondering what to do with my career. I had been working in law for years and decided to write a simple list: the things I liked about being an M&A lawyer, and the things I didn’t. The second list was longer.

It frustrated me how little of my job was about helping people make business decisions – and how much was about debating detail that often didn’t matter in the end. Well, at least not as far as I could tell. This wasn’t (and isn’t) a reflection on the value of lawyers. After all, the legal profession gave me my start in professional services, and I will always be grateful to the firms that took a bet on me – a guy who wrote about coffee table books for his English thesis at university, rather than studying commerce or doing extra commercial law modules.

That night made something clear: I wanted to be in the room for the big decisions, not just framing them or tidying them up. Like many lawyers considering an exit ramp, two pathways were most logical: strategy consulting or investment banking. So, selfishly (or by accident – it was quite late), I Googled ‘strategy consulting and investment banking’. I clicked on a link for a website and there was a list of businesses that proclaimed to do both. Pottinger was a name on that list.

“Do you want a Coke?” My host handed me the largest drink I’d ever seen: forty-four ounces of ice-cold liquid in a truly gigantic cup. I had no idea how I would ever consume it all and, three hours later, I had yet to reach the bottom.

It was July 4th, 1987, and I had just arrived in Tucson for a summer working at the Environmental Research Lab. It was run by the inestimable Carl Hodges, amongst other things one of the primary consultants on the development of the Epcot Center and designer of Biosphere 2. Beyond the common threads of science and dust, the bright Arizona landscape truly was a world away from my studies of Natural Sciences in the fusty old lecture halls and laboratories of Cambridge.

Herein lay one of the biggest lessons of that trip: the world around you can evolve incredibly quickly, whether through your own choices or events outside your control. Though humans are frequently wary of change, they are also incredibly adaptable. Within a week or two, I could happily consume one of those enormous beverages in twenty minutes over lunch. And I had settled in to driving electric carts, made friends with a concert harpsichordist and begun to explore the wonders of the Sonoran Desert. Little did I know that I’d return to work in America some thirty years later, nor that these lessons in adaptability might become so poignantly relevant.