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Posted by dani cass on January 22nd, 2009

If you’re reading this blog, congratulations, you’ve made it through Monday 19^th January 2009, touted by one Dr Cliff Arnall as the most depressing day of the year, nay the most depressing day in history!  

So, you’re still with us.  And if you agree that 1/8W + (D-d)3/8xTQ MxNA, where W is weather, D is debt, d is January salary, T is the time since Christmas, Q is the period since you gave up on quitting, M is motivation and NA is your need to take action then (and, apparently, this isn’t rocket science) you are now happier that you were on Monday.  Smiling yet?

Other reasons to be happy: 

Yesterday, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first African American president of the United States of America.  OK, it’s sort of depressing that being the first African American (or any other ethnicity) to achieve high office is still worthy of comment, but, maybe, with this milestone under our belts, we can finally turn our focus from skin colour to the job in hand.  You know, like, world peace, climate change, child poverty, the global recession.  Go Obama.

If you think it would take a genius to solve any one of these problems, you’d be wrong.  There’s a whole raft of new research and publications suggesting that there is nothing innate about success and that practice is the key marker of achievement in any field.  So, if you’ve spent your life lamenting the fact that you weren’t born gifted, cheer up, neither was anyone else. 

Sticking with mathematical formulae, someone has exercised their perfectly average brain to calculate that 10,000 hours of practice is what separates you and me from what we think of as genius.  Similarly, it would appear that talent is not hereditary.  If your dad was an England international, chances are, your spare time would be channelled in the same direction, contributing to the magical 10,000 hours and following in his footsteps. 

If this is true, we should have listened to our parents.  We could all be virtuoso concert pianists, Olympic athletes or Bill Gates by now.  Happily, there’s probably still time to nag our own progeny into brilliance.  Just an hour a day, two at weekends, every day from your ninth birthday and you’ll be a genius by the time you’re 30, son.  And if that seems like a high-risk strategy for funding your retirement, it doesn’t seem any higher risk than a pension these days.

Just as sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, schadenfreude is probably not a particularly lofty emotion.  But, despite the fact that we’ll all end up paying for it in the end, and some of us are paying for it now, seeing the big banks’ errors paraded before us is contributing to the sum of my happiness this week.  Really.

These lapses of judgement offer a salutary reminder that there’s no such thing as genius in business either.  No one is infallible, and the only difference between the business decisions we make every day and those of the former multinational masters of the universe is scale.

I’m not sure whether knowing this will ultimately make me more risk averse or cavalier, but I do know that, whatever happens, I’m unlikely to be responsible for wiping billions off the stock market.  And, whatever mistakes I’ve made in the past, no company has gone under as a result.  So, I’m feeling quite good about my contribution to business.  On that note, I’m off to write another client’s website and to offer them impartial advice based on my (too many years to mention) experience in business without a single bankruptcy.

Maybe that’s nothing to crow about.  There is though a school of thought that suggests bankruptcy does not equal failure, it’s what we do afterwards that counts.  But that’s another story …

Keep smiling

Chris
Studio 2 Online
Web Design Leicester