There are millions of people out of work struggling to find new sources of income. Is it frivolous to worry about creating meaningful work when others can’t find the meaningless kind? For many people, it absolutely is but hopefully not for you.
If the rent is due, the bank account is empty and bills are piling up faster than deposits then creating a unique business must wait. Find an existing gig for now. Flip houses, work Instacart, and drive Uber. Find undervalued products that can be fulfilled by Amazon, FBA, but get through the months, the weeks, and the days ahead. For those without a 9-to-5, any work is meaningful.
For the rest of us the philosophy is the same as always; use a day-job for financial support while launching a unique business.
If you can focus long-term and your financial world is stable, stay the course. Today’s challenges are unique but all preceding catastrophes were as well. Until society learned how to compensate, each one entailed new and seemingly world-ending implications. In 1980, interest rates climbed to 22%, gasoline was rationed and the Iran-Iraq War loomed as a precursor to a global conflict. Buying a house, getting a loan for a car, or finding capital for a business was akin to begging for money from a loan shark. It’s also the year that Ted Turner decided that the world needed something new, a TV channel that only presented the news. It only ran on Cable, a rare medium at the time, and offered no sitcoms, no comedies, no game shows, and no movies. CNN began in the midst of unimaginable times.
In 2001, after 9/11 and the Dot-com Bust, starting a technology company seemed absurd. The US fell prey to its worst terrorist act, the Nasdaq lost 75% of its value and thousands of companies evaporated overnight. Only months before, technology startups received capital merely for alluding to an Internet strategy. Later, they were penalized for it. Yet Mailchimp began by providing small businesses an alternative to expensive email software. Today, it’s worth billions.
The world’s pendulum swings from prosperity to despair and back again. Each new period of blight feels like the end of the world where entrepreneurship seems more foolish than it did the day before. The pendulum will shift back and patient entrepreneurs with a knowledge of history will prepare. Like their predecessors, entrepreneurs will conceive ideas today that will hatch tomorrow. You must conceive ideas today that will hatch tomorrow.
