Читать книгу Recession Driven Riches - Heru Nekhet - Страница 10

In the Star Trek TV series “The Next Generation” and “Voyager” their existed a pseudo-race of cybernetic organisms called the Borg. The Borg was portrayed as an invasion threat for the crew of the starship and the entire United Federation of Planets. The Borg existed and operated for the fulfillment of a single purpose which was to “add the biological and technological distinctiveness of other species to their own” in pursuit of perfection. This was to be achieved through forced assimilation, a process which would transform individuals and technology into Borg. Symbolically, we can look at the Borg like the global economic shift we are facing and the inevitable changes that it will bring. Despite the constant resistance by every species they encountered, The Borg responded simply, “resistance is futile.”

Although the above example is fictional, it holds a significant truth in the message. I want to share another example from a personal experience just to drive the point home. In 1989, I was a young teacher in New York City full of fire, idealism and stubbornness. I initially clashed constantly with, but later came to admire and respect my first principal, Miriam Klein. Ms. Klein was very intimidating. She stood an imposing six feet tall and commanded respect by her authoritative mannerisms. Like most people, I had no idea how the business of education was run. Ms. Klein ran that organization as fine as any CEO runs a Fortune 500 company. Every few years as city and state government would change, there would be a total makeover of the school system and a forced change in the way day to day operations and the educational process was to be handled.

Ms. Klein, just like the rest of us, did not like scrapping everything we were comfortable doing (especially when it worked) for something new, untested and drastically different than what we had experienced prior, but she knew that the changes could not be ignored. Despite what seemed like insurmountable challenges, year after year she masterfully led our school to national and even global prominence no matter what changes we had to make.

Having taken an interest in me, Ms. Klein groomed me for more than a decade on leadership, problem solving and organization skills. One of the finest lessons she taught me was how to handle introducing the drastic changes that were out of our control to the staff that were sure to protest. I learned from her that resistance, resentment, followed by acceptance is the process that humans go through when faced with unwanted change. Understanding the process, she simply introduced and trained everyone on the new system, and ensured that everyone would adhere to the changes through incentive or threat of sanctions (whatever it took). She knew people would grumble and even attempt to sabotage the changes initially, but eventually they would adjust the same way they always did.

We have entered into a new economic era in America. You can resist it about as much as you can single handedly stop a freight train. Resentment will only slow you down from taking the proper steps to improve your situation. As a matter of fact, if you do not embrace the change, you will surely sabotage your own success. It’s critically important for you to accept the reality that the world has changed and that the change is not a temporary shift. Most of the changes we are experiencing will be here for decades, and even when they fade we will not go back to yesterday. We will be introduced to something new and drastically different than we have ever seen before.

Taking a page out of Ms. Klein’s book, my advice to you is simple, the changes we are facing are here to stay, get over it, accept it, and let’s move forward. Most of the manufacturing jobs and other industrial age industry jobs are gone forever, the time of easy credit and borrowing are gone, and the ability to stay on a single job for 25 years, retire and collect a pension no longer exists. You can’t turn back the hands of time so the faster you accept the new normal, the quicker you can put yourself in a position to stop the financial bloodletting and start laying the foundation for wealth.