The Mission | Chapter 2

I was never quite good enough for my parents, you know, because I didn't study.

There were always a couple of girls who did better in school than me.

And it was always, can't you do better? And there's this one boy who more often than not got better grades than me.

They put him in front of me as a shining example.

And I remember one day I came back with an exam result and I got a B.

And my mother looked at this thing and she says, well, you got a B? And I says, yeah, but nobody else got a B.

Everybody else got C's and D's.

Did they give out A's too? I was never good enough.

For the longest time into my adult life, I would tell people that I'm still trying to please my mother.

Albrecht stopped at nothing to escape the humble upbringings of his childhood.

His overwhelming ambition meant he would do anything to succeed.

I was just super ambitious.

I knew I was going to be a tenured professor because tenured professors in those days in Europe were considered like demigods.

They were the upper crust of society.

They made a lot of money too.

and also the adoration of the people, the little people.

Albrecht excelled in college, even earning the prestigious Karl Marx Scholarship, an award limited to only 100 concurrent recipients in the entire country.

I went through three years of study.

There was general chemistry, inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry.

And I aced the program all the way through.

I was by far the best student in that group of 60.

And this was already an elite, hand-picked group.

I knew that there were rewards to be gained.

The most prestigious one was the Karl Marx scholarship.

That one paid 450 marks a month.