
2025….
Will it be twenty twenty thrive or twenty twenty dive?
How much control do you have over what happens this year?
What did scifi writer Terry Pratchett say: “This isn’t life in the fast lane – this is life in oncoming traffic…there is no shortage of news to suggest that caution will be a watchword for most people amidst simultaneous heightened tensions in many parts of the world.
When it comes to global events – only a tiny handful of people have any potential to exersize control over possible outcomes – and even then – nothing is certain.
Where you do have control is in how you choose to respond to what is happening around you.
Do you retreat in times of uncertainty, hunker down and wait for a signal that the all-clear has sounded before making big decisions – or do you actively seek out new opportunities when those around you are seeking shelter?
A CEO I know once stood up at his groups annual conference where I was delivering a keynote, and was talking about some of the businesses they had incubated and helped grow in a really tough economic environment. He said very simply: “Negative people, never build anything…”
He paused.
And repeated it.
“Negative people never build anything.”
Just five words.
But I felt like I had been punched in the gut.
You do have to be an optimist to commit capital to a new venture which may or may not succeed even in the most favourable environment– and I am not talking about sunshine optimism.
I am talking about a more granular optimism which is not that everything WILL be alright – it’s about the fact that things CAN be better…
The Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is a case in point. During the Global Financial Crisis as banks around the world failed and the financial system looked as if it might implode – Amazon was expanding not only its core retail business but was diversifying – including building something few of us could contemplate at that time – cloud computing. Amazon was seeing the opportunity that firms would be better served storing their information remotely on massive off premise servers they did not own, rather on expensive on site hardware which they had done till then…and Amazon Web Services was born.
I found this quote from Bezos the other day and it seems right to share it here: “It’s generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity…”
What are you doing? Waiting for certainty? Or looking for opportunity?