What is the biggest obstacle you have faced professionally?

Originally asked

The American Academy of Achievement, to its honourees, its oral-history interviews

The Academy of Achievement repeatedly asks honorees to identify a major professional obstacle or challenge and describe confronting it.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded Clive James said elsewhere, not written here
What I’ve got doesn’t hurt. I’ve been lucky. The treatment has been benign. I don’t know if I could concentrate if I was in pain. I’ve never had to stop.

Robert McCrum, Interview at James's home in Cambridge, published in the Observer New Review, The Observer, 15 March 2015 source ↗

Others on this question

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John Clauser Experimental physicist; Nobel laureate in Physics, 2022
The hard part was getting around this, this was a religion among physicists, and in fact even in the Bohr-Einstein debates, and with Schrödinger also, the universal religion was quantum mechanics makes correct predictions, period, no, off the table. What Bell's theorem and in particular our version of it, the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt experimental prediction, showed that either that had to be wrong, nor Einstein's whole legacy had to be wrong. I think at the time people who were critical of doing the experiment didn't realise really what was at stake, that it was that cut and dried between two religious icons, if you will, the field of physics. Since I kind of was the inventor of the CHSH inequality and the CH inequality and all that, I knew exactly what it was all about. But it took a long time for that to filter in.
Recorded Nobel Prize Outreach, Nobel Week interview, Stockholm, 6 December 2022, Nobel Prize Outreach, 6 December 2022 source ↗
David Vélez Co-founder and chief executive of Nubank
Sí, empezamos desde cero. Pedimos una licencia de financiamiento comercial, pero es difícil comenzar porque la banca se basa en confianza, regulación y escala. Hay barreras regulatorias que dificultan la entrada de nuevos jugadores. Es un sector históricamente cerrado, que favorece a los incumbentes. Aun así, logramos construir una marca fuerte y generar confianza en los consumidores.
Recorded Alejandra Rico Muñoz, interview, La República, 25 March 2026 source ↗
Jocelyn Bell Burnell Radio astronomer; discoverer of pulsars
Tony was cautious. He suspected I’d wired the radio telescope up wrong. So we checked on another radio telescope on the site. The thing was pulsing nicely on mine but as we stood by the pen recorder of this other telescope, nothing happened. It was a horrible moment. And suddenly there it was, five minutes later because we had miscalculated when the telescope would see it. If we’d miscalculated by 25 minutes, we’d have all gone home and the story would be different.
Recorded Louise Walsh, University of Cambridge 'Journeys of Discovery' interview series, 1 January 2020 source ↗
Akio Toyoda President of Toyota Motor Corporation, 2009–2023; chairman from 2023
I was raised not to dream. I was told to live for others, so I don’t have many dreams, but I face countless obstacles and challenges. Arrogance, conflict, criticism, insults, inaction. At Toyota, there was so much rationalizing of why things couldn’t be done. As if doing nothing was the best option.
Recorded overseas dealer representatives and guests, Akio Toyoda’s Juku, Toyota Times, 14 November 2023 source ↗

More from Clive James

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Question What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it? Failure & regret
One thing, it's too big a subject and I want to talk about it on paper if I talk about it at all. But I can say this much, because I thought the life that my father and mother would have had together was cut short and something of what they might have achieved I hope that I'm achieving in my work.
Recorded Philip Williams, 7.30, ABC, ABC News, 20 August 2015 source ↗
Question Has knowing that you will die changed how you live? Death & what remains
Yeah. These books are all around me and they'll be here when I go and I'm that sick. I just don't know when it ends. But in 2010, I got really ill and leukaemia was one of the things I was diagnosed with and eventually it will switch me off. So it raises the question: what do you do? Do you lie down and give up? Read the Bible? Or do you go on as you were reading and writing. And I've done the second and I've just done a little bit called Latest Readings which is about the books I've been reading lately and I could do another volume of that because I'm still reading.
Recorded Philip Williams, 7.30, ABC, ABC News, 20 August 2015 source ↗
Question What would you like to be remembered for? Death & what remains
It’s here. I’ve always thought that it was here. If you play to the gallery, that’s posterity. The best you can hope for is another gallery after you’ve gone, but you won’t see it. Statistically, it’s unlikely that much of what one does will be read for ever. It may just be one or two poems. For example, my Japanese Maple poem is famous among people who own a Japanese maple.
Recorded Robert McCrum, The Observer, 15 March 2015 source ↗

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