Managing in the Gray

Managing in the Gray

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Mill’s reaction to this experience was extraordinary. His

grueling education and devastating collapse would have

crushed many people, but Mill soldiered on and recast his

life. He rejected his father’s plan for him to attend Oxford

or Cambridge. He dramatically widened his reading and

thinking, became devoted to Romantic poetry, and ultimately

worked for several decades in a “day job” as a clerk in the

British East India Company. Mill also wrote books and articles

on a wide range of topics and became Britain’s most import-

ant nineteenth-century philosopher and public intellectual.

Why does Mill’s journey in life matter to us? Essentially, it’s

that he accepted Bentham’s mandate to think broadly about

hard decisions b