Early Life
Massow was born Ivan Field in Brighton, East Sussex. His relationships with his father and subsequently his stepfather were not good; as a boy he ended up being cared for by social services, before being adopted as a pre-teenager by a Mr John Massow. Commenting on his life prior to his adoption, Massow has stated that "My life up to then is a bit of a blur. I had four different families, my name changed from Field to Mitchell to Massow, I was moved around for various reasons."
Massow is dyslexic and left school at 16 with one O-level in metalwork, with possibly others in photography and history, however on the subject of his early qualifications Massow has commented that "I lied about them so much, I can't remember what's actually true." He studied at Eastbourne for a BTEC in art and design, then moved to Bristol and was employed by an insurance firm. In 1990 Massow moved to London and started his own financial services business.
Read more about this topic: Ivan Massow
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.”
—William Barrett (b. 1913)