My history teacher in high school wasn’t a history teacher. He was a history teacher. If you had a history teacher, you know what the emphatic italics are all about. He wasn’t a social studies teacher who happened to teach history. He was trained in the humanities at an East Coast university that predated Canadian Confederation and there wasn’t a curriculum guide in print that was going to suppress his professorial instincts. He’d litter the chalkboard with superfluous dates and tangential events. After 60 minutes, your notebook looked like a 1980s New York subway car. I remember there was a particular aphorism that he asked us to copy – in Latin – on the top of every test, even before we wrote down our names: Mater artium necessitas. It means ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ and it was his way of telling us to never give up, even when it seems hopeless. It speaks to the kind of resolve that separates those who look to others for solutions from those who look within. Roman Napieraj, founder of Napier Enterprises, is the latter individual. His story is the embodiment of that Latin maxim.
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS • NOVEMBER 2016
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