Fortune Follows The Bold
| If you believe the experts, we’re are in the worst crisis in the history of crises. That sounds gloomy — and it is. Your thumbs push story after story through your feeds of the world doing its best to hop into the flaming dumpster behind a taco bell. You long to curl up in bed and look at cat videos until it’s over. It’s all awful, and we’re all, of course, buggered. Yet, we’ve been here before, right? As a very young child, I still remember drills for a potential nuclear war. I had the begeezus scared out of me that at any moment, in a blinding flash of light, the plywood desk over my head would evaporate, and with it the world. Oddly, the threat didn’t go away during my childhood, but the drills did. I’ve always wondered if it was because someone realized that my desk wasn’t going to do much to prevent my inevitable deep neon green suntan. |
| At Brand Buddha our lease at our main building in San Clemente came up for renewal in April. We opted out as we were out of room and had begun stuffing our staff in broom closets. Luck smiled on us as we began working remotely. Nonexistent inventories began to materialize. Rents began to fall. The same happened in the workforce. Amazingly talented people began the employment migration. When the world is panicking, the person who sees an opportunity is faced with hardly any competition to step into the empty space and create something bold, to do something special. Being bold when the economy is thriving is more challenging than when it’s tanking. When the weather is clear, everybody can sail a boat. But when the horizon darkens, the clouds gather and the winds begin to blow, you quickly see who has been selling bullshit and who is poised to double down when others hold or fold. I’ve written before about Darwin’s statement about the survival of the fittest, and how it’s often explained as “the strong survive.” But the more accurate explanation is: those who are most adaptable to change will survive. It would be totally understandable to be paralyzed by fear and depressed by the state of the world. Or, you might begin to scan the horizon for the crack of sunlight in the clouds and plan for your breakout moment. |
