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Economic "Reform" Is A Dragon You Can Slay

Guest post by: Michael Hume

Article Overview: The economy is showing scary signs. It's going to get worse before it gets better, and our generation may have to deal with the sort of privations and difficulties faced by our grandparents and great-grandparents in the Great Depression of the 1930s; I only hope it isn't even worse. Are you ready?

Economic "Reform" Is A Dragon You Can Slay

Get Out Of Your Comfort Zone Now To Reduce Discomfort Later The economy is showing scary signs. It's going to get worse before it gets better, and our generation may have to deal with the sort of privations and difficulties faced by our grandparents and great-grandparents in the Great Depression of the 1930s; I only hope it isn't even worse. Are you ready?

Seriously: what if the stock market is trading at 3000 or lower within a year or two? What if unemployment doesn't go down from our current level around ten percent, but instead, doubles? What if inflation starts to roar, and hyper-inflation (the fabled million-dollar-loaf-of-bread) starts to look possible in the United States? Are you ready?

Here are two suggestions: start and grow a business, and get yourself a real financial education. The former will provide you with a more reliable income stream than sitting around waiting for someone else to provide or protect your income in tough times; the latter will give you a chance to be one of the one percent of people who are going to thrive and actually make money during the next Great Depression.

If you're comfortable in your job, that's great. Don't quit. But discomfort is coming (possibly even disaster), so you should think about getting a bit out of your comfort zone now to avoid being forcibly thrown from it later. It may make you uncomfortable to think about starting a business, for instance. But today, you can start an internet business with far less investment of time and money than you would've had to pony up to start a conventional business even a few years ago. And a real financial education might make you edgy, too; you'll have to make decisions and investments that your friends and neighbors wouldn't. That's because your friends and neighbors are placing their bets on "others" (their employers, their spouses, the government) to keep the steady paychecks rolling in... and you're going to have to bet on yourself. Your friends and neighbors will end up in the 99 percent who are about to be removed from their comfort zones by force.

I know, it sounds gloomy. But the message of hope and inspiration here is that you CAN do something about it, if you capture the entrepreneurial spirit within you and get to work preparing for the coming storm. You can learn. You can adapt. You can grow.

I have a friend who is teaching himself to become a salesperson - and a good one - after years of running a printing press (not the same type of work at all).

A brief personal story about an early lesson I got in growing and adapting: I was a stage actor in my twenties, and while I was never a star, I was a pretty good contributor to the professional shows I had the privilege of doing. I had the talent (mostly singing) to land the jobs, but my "brand" was around being a steady, reliable worker in a business that attracts (let's face it) a fair number of flaky people. Mine was a brand that really stood out. For instance, I was never late, I took great care of my costumes and props, and mainly I disciplined myself to show up to the first rehearsal of every show with every line and lyric memorized (this is called being "off-book," and most performers don't get there until several days or weeks into the rehearsal period).

One time I was between acting jobs, still working my day job at the newspaper, when I got a call from a local director who was doing an improv comedy show and needed to replace a departing actor. Of course, an improv show doesn't have a "book" from which you can be "off," so the whole notion scared me to death. I told him that probably wasn't my thing. He said he knew I'd be great at it, that my comedic...

... timing was awesome.

"Really, John," I said, "I don't think so. I don't do improv. I'm a book actor."

"It pays forty bucks."

"What time did you need me to come by?"

So I tried this show, and instead of learning the show from a script, I had to learn it by just watching another guy do it for a couple of performances and then jumping in the next night. It turns out I was a hit. But what I found out was that all the experience I had learning shows from books had taught me how to quickly learn a show, and a good deal of that experience transferred to learning a show quickly in a different way.

You have a ton of experiences in your life for which you don't give yourself "credit." Those experiences, however seemingly unrelated, are going to help you weather the coming storm. They're going to give you your own unique perspective, your own special way of creating a business that can sustain you, or of devising an investment strategy with which you can thrive in a very-different economic environment.

But get moving. You don't want to be sitting there in a year wishing you'd done something to prevent the catastrophe around you. Maybe you don't know computers. Maybe you don't know sales. Maybe you've never even tried to invest in the stock market, or anywhere else. But all the dragons you've slain in your life have taught you how to slay dragons... your past is littered with their dead, defeated bodies. This is just one more dragon. Trust yourself. You will learn what you need to learn, do what you need to do, and you can beat this.

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Article Tags: economic reform, inspirational leadership, personal responsibility, successful entrepreneurs



Related Forum Posts
Dragon's Den - I suspect a lot of the Dragon Den's debacle was edited to make it more dramatic. It is television after all. They have gotten so much coverage off of this that they may find a VC who will give them more money but b/c its not being play out on television no one will notice. I thought it was a good show but at the end of the day it is a show and the educational experience must be tempered by the fact that the entire interplay b/w Dragon and entrepreneurs was to attract viewers first and foremost. In the trenches, most of these deals fall apart during negotiations for the same reasons; too much control given up for too little money, different visision etc. etc. It just never get dramatized in the same way. Best of luck to the guys though- it was a good learning experience for them.


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