A Crisis of Confidence

This was emailed to me by my always encouraging mother today. She came across it in a newsletter while at work.

A Crisis of Confidence
"We're really pinching pennies these days." I've heard that a lot lately, from customers across the spectrum. It's as if the world is about to fall off a steep cliff, never to be seen again.

Perhaps our Grand Canyon, is more like a slight dip in the road. What if we all woke up in the morning and pretended that the last four months never happened? Would the wheels of commerce once again begin to turn?

Any student of history or economics knows that hard times are nothing new. Here's what Ralph Waldo Emerson had to say about it, 150 years ago:

We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork; now a little
joy, then a sorrow, now a sin, then a generous or brave action. We must always
be little whilst we have these alternations. Character is regular and
homogeneous. Our world, it is true, is like us: it has many weathers, here a
shade and there a rainbow; here gravel and there a diamond; polar ice, then
temperate zone, then torrid; now a genius, then a good many mediocre people.

Maybe hard times are good times to reconsider your course. Maybe they're really opportunities in disguise, designed to test our wits and fortitude. Maybe now's the time to do things that we knew we should have been done before, but were just too comfortable to take action.