[This was written during the Great Financial Fiasco…still seems relevant.]
In the movie, “G.I. Jane”, there is a scene where the master chief reads poetry. He quotes from D.H. Lawrence’s “Self-Pity”:
“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
The whole of this movie is about just that. You’d think that since it was such a popular film, we’d be seeing more stiffness in our collective spine as we face this economic implosion on a daily basis.
Darryl looked at me across the table at the espresso shop, his head hanging just a bit, and said, “I just don’t know what I’ll do if my company goes under. I’ll lose my house.”
I replied, “A failure of your business is not a failure of life, unless you let it be.”
The statistics routinely show that successful entrepreneurs have typically failed, and failed miserably, at least once on the way to a successful business adventure. The only failure in business is in character, and in not learning from the mistakes.
Character failure includes lying, cheating, stealing and betrayal, which we all recognize, however complicated and sophisticated the tactics might be. If you can say that you never did these sins on the way to bankruptcy, there is no failure to apologize for.
And what of the financial losses? I know a man of integrity whose family loves him and his friends would do anything to help him. He’s never owned a house, land or assets that don’t depreciate. He’s worked at the same job for 25 years. He’ll retire on a modest pension and hopefully some social security. That amount of money will allow him to take care of himself, his wife and their basic needs of food, shelter, clothing and medical care. He buys used appliances. He wears the same shoes until they’re worn out. He’s a lovely man I am proud to call a very close friend. He knows that health and loving relationships are the most important things in life.
So I looked at Darryl and said, “You are healthy and you have a good brain. You know how to work hard. You have many skills and experiences that would be valuable to others. If your business goes under, you may indeed lose your house. But that’s just a bunch of wood piled up. You can earn a living in a variety of ways. You may not have the big home on the hill and your cars won’t smell new, but if you’re of strong character, your family and friends will stand by you. What have you really got to complain about?”
Contrast this conversation with another I had with Jillian. She has lost two businesses. She’s seen her net worth go from a few million to essentially zero. Her husband is suffering from his second brain tumor in ten years. Her brother took his own life last year. Jillian and I met for lunch a couple of weeks ago. “How’s business?” I asked.
“Very interesting,” Jillian replied. “There are a couple of entrepreneurs I’m working with to help them through their incubation period of no money and great opportunity. They are such good people and it’s a privilege to try to help them.”
“Does it pay your bills?’ I asked.
“No, but they need me and I can help,” she said. “I’m not worried about the quid pro quo.”
Now here is a G.I. Jane of the business world. I left that lunch feeling more connected to the really important elements of life. The breeze was refreshing, the sun invigorating and the prospects for my future never more enticing, even as I face the same types of economic struggles that everyone else does these days.
Another conversation with Mirabelle about the mortgage crisis ensued a couple of days later. Mirabelle and her husband are doubly challenged. His profession is stock brokering. No money there for quite some time. Her career is marketing for consumer electronics firms. Similarly dismal prospects. In 2007, after the long slide began in housing prices, they elected to sell their house and move into another one. Not a good time to sell, and not a good time to buy. They signed up for a mortgage that they could barely afford at that time, and it’s gotten worse. And they didn’t pay their real estate taxes for three years, thinking it was being taken care of by someone else. Now Mirabelle is distraught. “It’s a debtor’s prison”, she bemoans. “We can’t pay the mortgage, and we have no money for the $40,000 tax bill. How do they expect us to climb out of the hole? We’ll never get out of debt. We have to consider bankruptcy.”
I’m thinking, “Well, no one forced you to sell and buy at the worst possible time. You could have noticed that there was no tax bill coming to your house and the mortgage statement showed no escrow account for paying it. Your husband didn’t have to wait two years to decide that zero commissions were untenable and find another job. You could have done the homework on the finances before you made all these decisions.”
In case it hasn’t come clear to everyone, this “recession” is much more than that. This is the major phase of change in world socio-economic influence that most economists and long-term planners saw coming a few decades ago. In other words, we’re going to relearn how to do more with less, live more conservatively. I mean that literally. We will learn to conserve. We’ll learn to appreciate again what is really important.
And quit whining.