Fear is rampant. Voices are increasingly shrill. Public indignation on Main Street is washing over Wall Street and Washington. Greed is running amok. At a time when millions are in truly in need, the leadership still doesn’t get it. They keep going to conferences, buying new corporate jets and paying bonuses to people for trashing previously solid companies and destroying peoples’ dreams and futures. Perhaps it isn’t a Chicken Little minute, but it is definitely a Marie Antoinette moment!
Watching all of this, I wonder, “What happened to the simpler times?” When life wasn’t so complicated, so fast? When we were more civil and people had manners? When we didn’t know everything in a nano second? When we didn’t expect everything? When we weren’t so critical and quick to find fault? When everything wasn’t so amazing?
It’s time, I think, for us all to step back, take a deep breath and see if we can put things back into perspective. For a lighter look at it all, check out Everything's amazing, nobody's happy. It will help make your day!
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Drew is a Personal Leadership Coach, Strategist, Speaker and Author. He shares stories of his journey, his life/business experiences and valuable lessons - advocating hope, positive change and inspiring others to look for the best within themselves.
If you would like him to speak to your group or you would like to attend a workshop, for more information you can contact him at info@drewsimmie.com
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( 3.3 / 58 ) Click a star 1-5, left to right, to rate.When my granddaughter is a grown woman she’ll look back on the great recession of the first decade of the 21st century – like we look back on the Great Depression.
I’m not suggesting that these years will be as hard as the ‘30s. Hopefully, at least in the West, the fiscal and monetary policies and strategies presently being implemented by various governments will, to some extent, cushion the blows and lessen the hardships. But this isn’t going to be a piece of cake, either.
There is a huge adjustment taking place. Built on the ashes of World War II, 60 years ago we started this run. And it was spectacular. We amassed a wealth the world has never seen before and made unbelievable advances in every field. We even went to the moon.
But like every society before us, and those that will come after, we eventually pushed it too far… to the point where we are way over the top. There is a correction that needs to be made.
Oh, we’ll be back, but before we are, first we have to wring the excess and the greed out of the system. Really. And that’s not easy. But we have to get real, trim our sails, learn to do with less and to share with others less fortunate. More of we and less of me.
From Wall Street to Main Street companies large and small are falling like dominos. Whole industries are disappearing taking with them millions of jobs that won’t be back. In a few short months trillions have vanished and trillions more will be spent to sort out the mess. As the late Senator Everett Dickson once famously said, “A billion here and a billion there… soon you’re talking about real money!”
A capitalistic economy is beholden to one thing only – the dollar. In a sense the dollar is democratic. Regardless of who you are, what you do or where you live, at the end of the day the dollar keeps everyone honest. We can lie for awhile, pretend all we like and ignore it at our peril but value for money is the rule. Regardless of the nature or size of the transaction – when the price is right – only when all parties are being honest, will the deal get done. But only then.
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Drew is a Personal Leadership Coach, Strategist, Speaker and Author. He shares stories of his journey, his life/business experiences and valuable lessons - advocating hope, positive change and inspiring others to look for the best within themselves.
If you would like him to speak to your group or you would like to attend a workshop, for more information you can contact him at info@drewsimmie.com
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( 3.5 / 79 ) Click a star 1-5, left to right, to rate.Unless you lived the privileged life of the ruling classes, in medieval Europe, when the sun went down the peasants in the villages went to bed. There wasn’t much else to do.
Aside from the odd Bible, there were no books, newspapers or magazines. Not to mention the fact that few knew how to read. There was no radio or TV, no mobile phones, no laptops, no iPods, and, of course, no internet. That meant there was no YouTube. Social networking was confined to meetings at the village well or on the banks of the nearby streams or rivers.Back then, when the world was lit only by fire, when we cooked over an open hearth and made our own clothes, the villagers kept up with the news and the daily gossip by word of mouth: how cool the weather seemed to be this year, what his lordship was up to, who was off fighting the infidels in a far flung war, who was sleeping with whom, who had recently died, how many bushels of wheat each field was yielding… pretty much what we talk about today. But regardless of the subject, the local news travelled around the village person to person.
If something happened in an adjoining hamlet, it could be months before they heard about it, if, indeed, they ever learned of it at all. They were totally isolated. Their world view… well they didn’t have one. Their vision stopped at the village edge, where the forest darkened and into which few ever dared to venture. They were unaware of the larger world and its great centres of learning and commerce, flashpoints of human brilliance like Alexandria, Athens, Baghdad, Beijing, Cairo, Constantinople, Cordoba, Damascus, Florence, London, Paris, Rome and Venice.
What little they did know of the outside world was provided by troubadours who travelled on foot and horseback from village to village bringing with them song and verse, news of far off places and distant events. Can you imagine the isolation?
What would they have made of our world? In even the remotest places of the globe you can almost always find a cell phone. With that the world shrinks down into the palm of your hand. In the middle of 2005, cell phone users totaled 2.4 million. If the numbers continue to multiply, the number of cell phones soon will be counted in the many billions.
Today, news and knowledge arrives not on foot or on horseback but in packets of electrical impulses travelling through cyberspace in nano seconds - to everywhere in the world and beyond, out into the universe, to the nethermost limits of our imaginations.
The digital revolution is changing everything, even as I write and you read this. Like birds flitting from tree top to tree top, we’re phoning, texting, emailing. We’re on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and we’re all a Twitter! In the era of the first YouTube president, we just can’t seem to stop communicating. I don’t think even Marshall McLuhan could have imagined how small our world has become.
Yet, in some strange, perverse way, even though all this technology has given us the ability to see into other villages, we don’t really see the villagers. Peering back, they don’t see us either. Oh, we’re connected, but somehow we’re separate. It shouldn’t be like that but it is. It’s still them and us. Unlike telecommunications, human nature doesn’t move so fast.
Seeing different peoples and cultures is one thing. To learn about and appreciate those differences is going take a lot more listening, more loving and less twittering.
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Drew is a Personal Leadership Coach, Strategist, Speaker and Author. He shares stories of his journey, his life/business experiences and valuable lessons - advocating hope, positive change and inspiring others to look for the best within themselves.
If you would like him to speak to your group or you would like to attend a workshop, for more information you can contact him at info@drewsimmie.com
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( 3.4 / 47 ) Click a star 1-5, left to right, to rate.It’s hard to know what to think these days – about the recession, I mean.
Only about six months ago, oil was $147 a barrel. The economy was on a roll. We were in what they used to call “high cotton” in the southern states. Today oil is in the mid $40’s and the economy is in the tank. And not just in North America. All our houses are on fire. We’re so connected and interdependent that we cannot escape what has become a global financial conflagration.
I saw a piece on a BBC documentary about how the recession was affecting China. Even there factories are closing. Peasants are returning to their villages. Growth has slowed to a mere 8%. A man selling bananas from his cart outside of a factory in Guangzhou reported that his sales are off 50%.
People have closed their wallets. They’re scared to death. And no one really knows what to do.
Governments think they do. Countries around the world are resorting to stimulus packages, trying to pump prime the economy and restore confidence. Let’s hope they get it right.
All the while, the bankers and the captains of industry have pointedly parked their private planes. They’re humbly, visibly flying first class on commercial flights or taking the train as they shuttle to meetings with the lawmakers seeking billions in handouts.
At the same time, people on Main Street are dug in, holding on to their jobs, their businesses, their homes and each other - determined to see this through.
Eventually the market will come back. People will start spending again. Confidence will return. But only when we have wrung out the greed and the excess and restored some semblance of balance and order. Until then, there’s no place to hide.
This is not the first time the bubble has burst, nor will it be the last. It’s a cycle. There have been other times throughout history. There was the Tulipmania in Europe in the 1600’s, the South Sea Bubble in the 1720's, The Japanese implosion in the 1990’s, and the one we don’t want to talk about… the Great Depression in the 1930’s.
Hopefully, we are not headed there, but it could be close. There are many iconic images of that time - soup lines and unrest in the cities, unemployed men riding the rails. But none have so seared our memories as the plight of the US western farmers fleeing the Dust Bowl of the 1930's, heading west to California, to greener pastures and a new start. If you want a quick snap shot of what it was like – and want to hear the hit tune of that era, click on to www.youtube.com and look back in time.
Fingers crossed…
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Drew is a Leadership Coach, Strategist, Speaker and Author. He shares stories of his journey, his life/business experiences and valuable lessons - advocating hope, positive change and inspiring others to look for the best within themselves.
If you would like him to speak to your group or you would like to attend a workshop, for more information you can contact him at info@drewsimmie.com
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( 3.5 / 54 ) Click a star 1-5, left to right, to rate.In our interdependent, totally connected global world it has already become a cliché to say that we are in truly challenging times. We are. Uncertainty and fear loom large. There’s a new generation taking the helm and there’s no getting around the changes facing us all, individually and collectively.
If ever there was a time for courage and hope this is it. How well we adapt to the challenges and manage the myriad changes will have a huge bearing on our personal and professional lives.
Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means things might get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things might get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make it better.
The question is this: Which of those three conditions describe how you feel?
Caught on the cusp between the end of one era and the beginning of the next, buffeted by the waves of change, there will be winners and losers. Having the courage to try a new approach, to see beyond current horizons and look for new possibilities is what the winners are doing right now. They’re hopeful by nature and they’re not waiting. They’re fully intending to weather the storm, to stay afloat and be in position to catch the next wave. Are you?
Last Friday evening I went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an American drama film based on the 1921 short story of the same name,written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is a bizarre, imaginative story about a man who was born old and gradually grew younger as the years passed. It has been getting a lot of publicity and the story line caught my imagination. What tipped the scales, though, and took me to the theatre was a full page ad in the New York Times, Tuesday, January 20, 2009, a promo piece for the movie. No pics – just this:
"It’s never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit. Start when you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best if it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again."
- Eric Roth, From the Screenplay of THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON."
The story was published almost 100 years ago but the message is timeless. Hard times are looming ahead. For how long, no one really knows. But we will prevail. The good times will return, even better than the last. As a new era approaches and once again we’re being tested, it’s important to remember that nothing stays the same. It never has.
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As a professional speaker/storyteller, writer and coach, Drew shares stories of his journey, his life/business experiences and valuable lessons - advocating hope, promoting positive change and inspiring others to look for the best within themselves.
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