Traditional Historic American Values - Part 6: Opportunity
14/October/2009 11:54 Filed in: Weekly
Column
Volume 11, Issue 34
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“Trivial Pursuit” is a game where you try to come up with answers to questions that have little real importance. Most would say that looking at what is happening in our country and the world today that the answers are not trivial and really important. So why are we so frantically trying to create answers to questions that really are based upon an unreal world?
None of the answers being proposed to the current, but wishfully ending, global financial crisis consider any of the five reality topics we are discussing in this series. Those for a renewal of our thinking processes are: Natural Law, Religion, Freedom & Liberty, Opportunity, and Leadership. If discussed at all these topics are relegated to pretty much Trivia, with the capital T. Hence, it is assumed that we are so enlightened that we really only need to focus on style rather than substance.
Substance, what is that? As long as we have money, especially money in dollar denominations everything will be all right. It really doesn’t matter that sometime in 2011 the debt of the United States will exceed her Gross Domestic Product. A shrinking dollar means that our exports will be cheaper overseas and the Fed has inflation under control, because they say they have.
One of the true Natural Laws relates to liquidity. That liquidity can relate to water, but also relates to financial liquidity. That law states is if you pump much more water from a finite well than can be replaced from the aquifer, the well is going to go dry.
We could spend this whole article writing about opportunities existing and soon to be existing in the management and distribution of real water, but just like energy that is a real world and today the real world, especially in the United States, is treated like a television sitcom.
“Trouble, sacrifice, reality, the devil, God, I don’t believe in any of those myths, hence they don’t exist, because if they did, that might upset my simplistic narcissistic worldview.”
As a world we are rapidly closing in on the 500th anniversary of the last truly significant world reality check. That of course was the Reformation, or the Protestant Reformation in Europe. On the day that virtually all of western culture celebrates Halloween, a small minority of Christians celebrate Reformation Day. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted 95 Theses for debate on the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, thus historically marking the beginning of a religious and cultural event that would eventually change the course of world history.
In the context of this week’s discussion on the opportunities that you as an individual and collectively in community and enterprise can focus toward, we need some sort of remaking of the way things currently are, to what they truly can be. If you do that research utilizing the five topics of this series you should be able to refine them into something truly unique for our changing culture.
“Change you can believe in,” denotes a religion that must be taken on faith, but that must be understood in the context that there is really, “nothing new under the sun.”
In the twentieth century, pretty much all of President Obama’s prescriptions for change have been tried, and “have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” However, as he often reminds us in his speeches, he didn’t create this mess – and he is right. What created this mess was a form of capitalism, unleashed from the restraints of Natural Law, Religion, Freedom & Liberty, Opportunity, and Leadership, which most people “could believe in.” In other words Obama’s change is really reformation.
What is even more amazing is the President has put in charge of his reformation, pretty much the same power structure that either helped create the mess, or have been so repudiated by their extreme views from a cross section of the political spectrum, that there is no vision, workable or not, to a future in which anyone might hope for a stable security.
So getting back to the Protestant Reformation, the opportunities for the future pretty much rest upon the principles of a protestant reformation, beyond the pale of contemporary orthodoxy. The contemporary orthodoxy here referring to not just what we would generally classify as religion, but also the orthodoxy of culture or worldviews.
For example, when I mention materialism and consumerism being reformed, you quickly are brought to the frontier of a flat earth. Beyond the horizon, only exists a land of metaphors, talking points, spin, demons and dragons, hostile people, wild animals, the list is endless. An endless list of unknowns, sounds like a frontier of opportunity to me. The problem is that you can’t cross that frontier by watching television. You have to get out in the real world. Isn’t the real world a frightening concept?
Pretty much since the beginning of 2009, about half a million Americans each week have faced that reality, by a trip to the unemployment office. If you have never been there it is sort of an adventure, a time for a new beginning, the hope for a very brief time to reflect on where you are going, and how you really would like to get there.
Then comes the reality that the unemployment check doesn’t allow you to continue your lifestyle, without some sacrifice. If you have some savings and investments you begin to liquidate that wealth. If you have little liquid wealth, you quickly learn the reality of prayer. As the reality continues to grow, the option of formal churchy religion doesn’t seem all that repulsive anymore. Your life is being reformed, hour-by-hour, day-by-night.
The problem with this new American Dream is it seems to be a nightmare. There is an old cliché, “necessity is the mother of invention.” In other words this nightmare is really the primal urge to grasp a new opportunity to reform who you are into what you hoped you might someday be. The problem is not so much the vision, but the path and making that path real. Let us now look at the reality of the wilderness through where your path will sojourn.
I many times use the statement that my mother never went to college, but she had an honorary doctorate in worry. Most of that worry had to do with not having enough money.
In the context of the financial meltdowns and bailouts this worry doctoral financial concern is pretty much a universal degree, even with real advanced degrees from prestigious universities. Though we would never openly admit it, for most of us the concept of earning several million dollars a year, even if most of it is in stock options and or bonuses is just as frightening has not being able to pay the monthly electricity bill.
So because of these worries, the financial future of the United States of America has been set on a unwise fiscal course and is as shaky as it has been probably since the American Revolution. When other nations have faced such reality this is normally handled politically and financially by greatly increased monetary liquidity with the promise of fiscal restraint when times get better. This is now the published course of the United States. Few nations, because of debasement of Natural Law, Religion, Freedom & Liberty, Opportunity, and Leadership, are able to pull it off.
What naturally follows is inflation, many times hyperinflation, flight from the currency to other assets, especially liquid hard assets such as precious metals, and gems. With the recent decline in the dollar, and sixty percent of world trade based upon the dollar as the exchange currency, the rest of the world is beginning to factor in that reality.
All the leadership of the United States has failed and is failing to understand reality. Hence there are vast oceans of opportunities available in the reform of funny money, in this case the United States Dollar. It also means that your remaining financial wealth will better serve your future actively invested in wealth creation enterprises.
So we see emerging is your opportunity to do something you always wanted to do by putting your existing wealth to work in doing what you were created to do. That is perhaps the most neglected Natural Law now not practiced in the United States. In other words, “The Good Lord put you on this earth for a purpose. That purpose was not to take up space, but to use your gifts to make the world better than where it was when you entered.”
Money is a form a liquidity to help you accomplish that task, but it must be a means rather than an end.
After a personal afternoon lecture in the office of the president of a small Vancouver, BC stock brokerage firm many years ago, I have had no confidence in America’s Wall Street. That was a few years after my above description of my significant trip to the unemployment office, or as it now is euphemistically called in Washington State, Work Source. In context of somewhat recent events, that lecture would say that Bernie Madoff was only doing what he had done for years in NASDAQ, he was just doing it on a personal scale when he got caught and went to jail for the rest of his life.
Having said that, eventually it is prudent to try to grow your opportunity adventure beyond, your own financial seed. They will teach you in entrepreneurial endeavors that your business plan needs financial projections. The one universal truth in those numbers is that they are totally wrong, all the time. That doesn’t mean you don’t need to understand the ramifications of cash flow, cash flow, cash flow. So get or create a spreadsheet and put in the funny numbers, after all we now live in the era where the money you are playing with is funny money anyway. Once you get up and operating purchase and maintain an accounting program that will track your cash flow, cash flow, cash flow.
What the data shows you is that rapid growth is much more difficult to handle than growth slower than your projections. This runs counter to the perceived notion that rapid growth means you can take your money to the bank sooner. The actuality of rapid growth means that you need to keep your money (or the money of others) working longer than you had hoped, and you need to go to the bank for a loan of working capital. This means that you need to find a real banker, rather than just a bank employee. Real bankers are pretty much an extinct species in our current financial ecosystem.
This brings me to the real window for you to shine your opportunity in this world. I have a long story to illustrate this principle in your opportunity-seeking environment. Sparing you the details, the one thing that will make your opportunity develop is a personal trait that used to be known as “Integrity.”
If you want to sum up what Americans find wrong with their leadership is that the leadership is without integrity. If you want to sum up what most foreigners find wrong with America and Americans is they are interested only in things and money and lack integrity.
Salesmen hire salesmen, engineers hire engineers, smart people hire other smart people, but the prime employment criteria for a crook is to hire a person of integrity. Think about it. Integrity is really the only truly transportable wealth you take with you wherever you go.
This points to the greatest obstacle you will face as a person developing your opportunity is that most people are not crooks, hence a person with integrity is threatening, especially to men in middle management. That is simple because most middle managers are not qualified to be there. The reason they are in management is because they were a great salesman, great engineer, great something other than a great manager. One time we called this the Peter Principle.
Now probably a significant number of the readers of this week’s column will be male middle managers, let go from the security of big corporate America. Look at the opportunity that exists to get back to doing that great something you always wanted to be, to create that company you knew could do a better job than the Lazy C(orporation).
If you really look at management in America, you see persons lacking a diversity of skills, especially people skills. There in lies perhaps the greatest tragedy to America to come out of Viet Nam. That was with the all volunteer military the opportunity ceased for civilians to learn how to lead other people, to accomplish a mission. Achieving the mission with integrity combines the reality of a vision with skills to make opportunity real, by treating everyone as created in the image of God. That is what leadership is all about and what we shall attempt to briefly outline next week.
Podcast
Podcast
>>PDF copy
>>Print view
“Trivial Pursuit” is a game where you try to come up with answers to questions that have little real importance. Most would say that looking at what is happening in our country and the world today that the answers are not trivial and really important. So why are we so frantically trying to create answers to questions that really are based upon an unreal world?
None of the answers being proposed to the current, but wishfully ending, global financial crisis consider any of the five reality topics we are discussing in this series. Those for a renewal of our thinking processes are: Natural Law, Religion, Freedom & Liberty, Opportunity, and Leadership. If discussed at all these topics are relegated to pretty much Trivia, with the capital T. Hence, it is assumed that we are so enlightened that we really only need to focus on style rather than substance.
Substance, what is that? As long as we have money, especially money in dollar denominations everything will be all right. It really doesn’t matter that sometime in 2011 the debt of the United States will exceed her Gross Domestic Product. A shrinking dollar means that our exports will be cheaper overseas and the Fed has inflation under control, because they say they have.
One of the true Natural Laws relates to liquidity. That liquidity can relate to water, but also relates to financial liquidity. That law states is if you pump much more water from a finite well than can be replaced from the aquifer, the well is going to go dry.
We could spend this whole article writing about opportunities existing and soon to be existing in the management and distribution of real water, but just like energy that is a real world and today the real world, especially in the United States, is treated like a television sitcom.
“Trouble, sacrifice, reality, the devil, God, I don’t believe in any of those myths, hence they don’t exist, because if they did, that might upset my simplistic narcissistic worldview.”
As a world we are rapidly closing in on the 500th anniversary of the last truly significant world reality check. That of course was the Reformation, or the Protestant Reformation in Europe. On the day that virtually all of western culture celebrates Halloween, a small minority of Christians celebrate Reformation Day. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted 95 Theses for debate on the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, thus historically marking the beginning of a religious and cultural event that would eventually change the course of world history.
In the context of this week’s discussion on the opportunities that you as an individual and collectively in community and enterprise can focus toward, we need some sort of remaking of the way things currently are, to what they truly can be. If you do that research utilizing the five topics of this series you should be able to refine them into something truly unique for our changing culture.
“Change you can believe in,” denotes a religion that must be taken on faith, but that must be understood in the context that there is really, “nothing new under the sun.”
In the twentieth century, pretty much all of President Obama’s prescriptions for change have been tried, and “have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” However, as he often reminds us in his speeches, he didn’t create this mess – and he is right. What created this mess was a form of capitalism, unleashed from the restraints of Natural Law, Religion, Freedom & Liberty, Opportunity, and Leadership, which most people “could believe in.” In other words Obama’s change is really reformation.
What is even more amazing is the President has put in charge of his reformation, pretty much the same power structure that either helped create the mess, or have been so repudiated by their extreme views from a cross section of the political spectrum, that there is no vision, workable or not, to a future in which anyone might hope for a stable security.
So getting back to the Protestant Reformation, the opportunities for the future pretty much rest upon the principles of a protestant reformation, beyond the pale of contemporary orthodoxy. The contemporary orthodoxy here referring to not just what we would generally classify as religion, but also the orthodoxy of culture or worldviews.
For example, when I mention materialism and consumerism being reformed, you quickly are brought to the frontier of a flat earth. Beyond the horizon, only exists a land of metaphors, talking points, spin, demons and dragons, hostile people, wild animals, the list is endless. An endless list of unknowns, sounds like a frontier of opportunity to me. The problem is that you can’t cross that frontier by watching television. You have to get out in the real world. Isn’t the real world a frightening concept?
Pretty much since the beginning of 2009, about half a million Americans each week have faced that reality, by a trip to the unemployment office. If you have never been there it is sort of an adventure, a time for a new beginning, the hope for a very brief time to reflect on where you are going, and how you really would like to get there.
Then comes the reality that the unemployment check doesn’t allow you to continue your lifestyle, without some sacrifice. If you have some savings and investments you begin to liquidate that wealth. If you have little liquid wealth, you quickly learn the reality of prayer. As the reality continues to grow, the option of formal churchy religion doesn’t seem all that repulsive anymore. Your life is being reformed, hour-by-hour, day-by-night.
The problem with this new American Dream is it seems to be a nightmare. There is an old cliché, “necessity is the mother of invention.” In other words this nightmare is really the primal urge to grasp a new opportunity to reform who you are into what you hoped you might someday be. The problem is not so much the vision, but the path and making that path real. Let us now look at the reality of the wilderness through where your path will sojourn.
I many times use the statement that my mother never went to college, but she had an honorary doctorate in worry. Most of that worry had to do with not having enough money.
In the context of the financial meltdowns and bailouts this worry doctoral financial concern is pretty much a universal degree, even with real advanced degrees from prestigious universities. Though we would never openly admit it, for most of us the concept of earning several million dollars a year, even if most of it is in stock options and or bonuses is just as frightening has not being able to pay the monthly electricity bill.
So because of these worries, the financial future of the United States of America has been set on a unwise fiscal course and is as shaky as it has been probably since the American Revolution. When other nations have faced such reality this is normally handled politically and financially by greatly increased monetary liquidity with the promise of fiscal restraint when times get better. This is now the published course of the United States. Few nations, because of debasement of Natural Law, Religion, Freedom & Liberty, Opportunity, and Leadership, are able to pull it off.
What naturally follows is inflation, many times hyperinflation, flight from the currency to other assets, especially liquid hard assets such as precious metals, and gems. With the recent decline in the dollar, and sixty percent of world trade based upon the dollar as the exchange currency, the rest of the world is beginning to factor in that reality.
All the leadership of the United States has failed and is failing to understand reality. Hence there are vast oceans of opportunities available in the reform of funny money, in this case the United States Dollar. It also means that your remaining financial wealth will better serve your future actively invested in wealth creation enterprises.
So we see emerging is your opportunity to do something you always wanted to do by putting your existing wealth to work in doing what you were created to do. That is perhaps the most neglected Natural Law now not practiced in the United States. In other words, “The Good Lord put you on this earth for a purpose. That purpose was not to take up space, but to use your gifts to make the world better than where it was when you entered.”
Money is a form a liquidity to help you accomplish that task, but it must be a means rather than an end.
After a personal afternoon lecture in the office of the president of a small Vancouver, BC stock brokerage firm many years ago, I have had no confidence in America’s Wall Street. That was a few years after my above description of my significant trip to the unemployment office, or as it now is euphemistically called in Washington State, Work Source. In context of somewhat recent events, that lecture would say that Bernie Madoff was only doing what he had done for years in NASDAQ, he was just doing it on a personal scale when he got caught and went to jail for the rest of his life.
Having said that, eventually it is prudent to try to grow your opportunity adventure beyond, your own financial seed. They will teach you in entrepreneurial endeavors that your business plan needs financial projections. The one universal truth in those numbers is that they are totally wrong, all the time. That doesn’t mean you don’t need to understand the ramifications of cash flow, cash flow, cash flow. So get or create a spreadsheet and put in the funny numbers, after all we now live in the era where the money you are playing with is funny money anyway. Once you get up and operating purchase and maintain an accounting program that will track your cash flow, cash flow, cash flow.
What the data shows you is that rapid growth is much more difficult to handle than growth slower than your projections. This runs counter to the perceived notion that rapid growth means you can take your money to the bank sooner. The actuality of rapid growth means that you need to keep your money (or the money of others) working longer than you had hoped, and you need to go to the bank for a loan of working capital. This means that you need to find a real banker, rather than just a bank employee. Real bankers are pretty much an extinct species in our current financial ecosystem.
This brings me to the real window for you to shine your opportunity in this world. I have a long story to illustrate this principle in your opportunity-seeking environment. Sparing you the details, the one thing that will make your opportunity develop is a personal trait that used to be known as “Integrity.”
If you want to sum up what Americans find wrong with their leadership is that the leadership is without integrity. If you want to sum up what most foreigners find wrong with America and Americans is they are interested only in things and money and lack integrity.
Salesmen hire salesmen, engineers hire engineers, smart people hire other smart people, but the prime employment criteria for a crook is to hire a person of integrity. Think about it. Integrity is really the only truly transportable wealth you take with you wherever you go.
This points to the greatest obstacle you will face as a person developing your opportunity is that most people are not crooks, hence a person with integrity is threatening, especially to men in middle management. That is simple because most middle managers are not qualified to be there. The reason they are in management is because they were a great salesman, great engineer, great something other than a great manager. One time we called this the Peter Principle.
Now probably a significant number of the readers of this week’s column will be male middle managers, let go from the security of big corporate America. Look at the opportunity that exists to get back to doing that great something you always wanted to be, to create that company you knew could do a better job than the Lazy C(orporation).
If you really look at management in America, you see persons lacking a diversity of skills, especially people skills. There in lies perhaps the greatest tragedy to America to come out of Viet Nam. That was with the all volunteer military the opportunity ceased for civilians to learn how to lead other people, to accomplish a mission. Achieving the mission with integrity combines the reality of a vision with skills to make opportunity real, by treating everyone as created in the image of God. That is what leadership is all about and what we shall attempt to briefly outline next week.
Podcast
Podcast