Chapter 9
Hard times are not the time to stop thinking.
You can take the 3 Minutes you need to read this.
You will never hear me say:
“I’m sick of this!” or “I’m too old for this shit!”
However ridiculous the state of the world, the economy, the politicos, the actions of others that we have no control over … (despite the relief of moaning on the not so quiet).
When they come for me they’ll have to use a big beast of a monkey wrench on my doubly stiff arthritic / rigger mortised hands to disentangle the pencil, paint brush or keyboard I’ll still be using postmortem.
If they find me holding a guitar in one hand and a glass of cheap Malbec in the other, I’ll be too relaxed to stop them.
“Never, ever give up” as some chap called Winston once said.
Seriously.
• Fear is the greatest natural paralytic.
• Panic is the fastest way to defeat.
• But thinking, doing, carrying on because
“it’s all about the work” achieves two things:
1. It takes your mind away from worse case scenarios and
2. It can produce the outcomes that will stop you ever seeing them come to pass.
Hello Fellow Travellers – hang around this campfire and help me inform the uninitiated of the stupidity of our lives.
NOW LET’S BRING IT DOWN A NOTCH
and discuss the usefulness of this attitude.
It takes a touch on the tiller to change course – and business is like that, no matter what the size or history of the company, every one of them have had their ups and downs – even those big old steam driven juggernauts didn’t go in a straight line across the Atlantic.
Even the largest had icebergs to avoid.
If you’re part of a team that keeps a big ol’ business on track with 200 to 2,000+ employees, you wouldn’t be as personally affected should the ship sink, as your counterparts in tiny businesses – in their canoe and sailing dinghy companies.
Hands on owners know each employee personally, how they spend their wages, when a spouse or offspring has a birthday, why they are pissed off on a Monday morning, or why they aren’t concentrating; because their personal lives are carried to work by their mobile phones and sandwich boxes.
Business at most levels is the same – we’re all in a boat with an irreparable hole and all we can do is bail out faster than the waters are coming in.
While at the same time having all hands making something you can sell in the next port – a port where the ship building and repair yard has closed down because all its crafts people have left to work in AI.
AND HERE’S THE THOUGHT IN A STORM:
If you had a plan, a product, a service that you knew was good and commercially viable, THAT doesn’t change when you get hit with the unexpected:
With ridiculous new taxes, the disappearance of key people through illness for months, or a change in the way a keystone customer is managed.
Or anything that results in a bookkeeper locking themselves in the toilet for an hour. Or a tsunami of annual leave requests overlap into a solid self-fusing rubber cover, shrouding growth plans.
RANDOM ACCESS
To paraphrase Sir Paul McCartney: “It’s all still in there, it’s just the hard drive that’s full”.
You may not know it – but you already have all the answers to everything.
Need help with that?
As it says at the foot of Brand America:
“Bring us your tired, your sore eyed,
Your befuddled messes
Your tempest-tossed…”
The kettle’s on.
