It’s the 2nd of March, 2009. The Dow is under 7,000 for the first time since 1997. Fear seems like it’s gripping just about everyone these days. From old people too scared to leave shitty jobs to young people with nothing to lose not wanting to start the company that could become the next Google or Apple. CNBC (and every news channel for that matter) is a non-stop barrage of blood and carnage, at least of the financial variety.
And through all this economic death and destruction all I can do is offer two words:
Let’s go.
As this most excellent Paul Graham essay points out, it’s never been a better time to start a company.
As Umair Haque has been repeatedly sounding the gong, it’s never been a better time to remake capitalism.
Everyone morning that we wake up and flip on the tele and see the Dow down another 300 points (good news…there can only be 22 more of those days! 
) we should thank our lucky stars that we’re alive during this time. Because history tends to do a pretty good job of forgetting how we get ourselves into these messes and a fantastic job remembering, honoring and rewarding those who pull us out of them.
Where do we start? A great place is the conditioning. Each and every day we wake up and choose how we want to condition ourselves. Want to feel fear and anxiety? Easy…flip on the news. Read the paper. You’ll hear plenty of reasons why you should be stuffing money under mattresses and clinging to that safe job (Advice: No job is safe in this economy or any economy.)
So start there. Flip the conditioning. Remind yourself and that you’ll be dead soon and truly have nothing to lose anyway. Remember that every inch is important and that the winners are the ones who fight for those inches. Never forget that the ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the only ones who do. Or do what I’ve done just about every time I feel myself getting a little off-center by the surrounding chaos and watch the Ted Kennedy’s Eulogy at RFK’s funeral.
I cranked through the remarkable book Brothers last week which chronicles the Kennedy brothers and their mission to change the world. JFK and RFK were far from perfect but I think why they are so fondly remembered is their ability to rise to the occasion in times of immense challenge. During the Cuban Missile Crisis we, according to Noam Chomsky in this chilling video, were one word away from terminal nuclear war. That was what the Kennedys were dealing with. Kind of puts the sub-prime crisis in a bit of perspective eh?
So step through that fear and realize that true leaders only surface in times of crisis. And these my friends are those times. And we’re so blessed to be exactly where we are. We have the opportunity to do something remarkable right now. To change the planet in new and innovative ways. It won’t be easy. True and meaningful change never is.
It will mean casting aside some of the ways we’ve been living. Thinking really hard about stuff like consumerism and how we accumulated so much stuff. Taking a good long look at stuff like the education industry, the food ecosystem and health care and thinking about what we’d do if we were rebuilding them from scratch. You know, zero-base the heck out of them. And skip the bullshit conditioning that tells us that we’re not powerful enough to do that.
Instead surround yourself with the crazies. The people who know that anything is possible. The people who’ve done stuff that will blow your mind (keep repeating it, anything is possible). The people who would laugh at the notion that there’s such a thing as too high of a degree of difficulty. Immerse yourself in that. Bathe in it for a few weeks. Or months. Or the rest of your life.
So my apologies to Umair and Pavlina and Bruno and Brian and all the other people who I’ll likely channel in this blog. You guys got brought me to this place. I owe you all an eternal debt of gratitude. And to the people who walk through the room from time to time. You know, the ones who will whisper in our ears if we’ll only listen. MLK. Gandhi. Nelson Mandela. I think if there were here they would all be saying pretty much the same thing to us at this very unique point in history.
Let’s go.
Mon, Mar 2, 2009
Entrepreneurship, Inspiration