Earlier today I posted regarding www.bounceback2021.com, a new way for you to achieve a 'real reset' of your brand or business plans.
The very next thing that happened was The Daily Stoic popped up in my inbox. The wise & talented Jodie Cook recommended this source of inspiration to me, some years ago. Today they came up with the beautiful observations, below, regarding finding an opportunity in the situation we all share.
I hope they’ll forgive me editing them a bit for length but the point is still the same. It’s never about what is happening to you, it’s about how you react.
“No one would have chosen this. No one is that crazy. To have your life disrupted. To be out of work. To lose money or people you love. To see institutions taxed beyond their capacities. To see people scared or frustrated.
But this pandemic is a classic “there it is” situation. It’s here. It happened. Now what?
We should think about the advice from the writer Jorge Luis Borges:
A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely.
You have the power to do this. We all do. We don’t have the power to start the V-shaped economic recovery. We don’t have the power to create more ventilators or to magically fix the regulatory and government agencies that failed to stop or respond properly to this crisis. We lack, tragically, the power to resuscitate the victims who this virus has claimed.
To decide to use this as raw material? To learn from it? To transform it? To find an opportunity within it? Yes, that remains in our power.” Daily Stoic, 23-9-20
In the UK, yesterday, 22/9/2020, is the date we really did confirm that ‘BAU is not coming back’. Previously, judging from what I see on LinkedIn, a lot of companies have been paying lipservice to that idea but actually treading water, secretly hoping to pick up where they left off.
Now that you know you can’t, how will you react?
One of the questions our initiative will be asking clients is: how has the pandemic transformed your business itself, not just its market? And no, I don't mean “hey, now everybody knows how to use videoconferencing”.
Ask: what have you reduced? What have you increased? What eliminated? What created? There will be more subtle and probably influential things, within those four questions, in which opportunity lies. Companies must find them.
Of course, some fresh eyes on the subject could be what’s needed, in which case we can help.