Crises are short-term accidents that happen along the way and that affect our short-term planning. While we cope with them, however, we must not forget our original project.
Elon Musk founded Space X in the month of May 2002 and Tesla in 2003. Certainly the crisis of 2008-2009 has slightly messed up his plans, but he has never turned away from his purpose which was to bring man to Mars or to make an electric car available to everyone.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004. In the month of June 2008, he finally managed to close, by paying, the lawsuit with the Winklevoss who claimed to be entitled to the shares of the social network and, here he was, he was hit by the recession of 2008-09. However, this did not distract him from his plan to connect humanity through a social network. Indeed, in early 2009 Facebook launches the Like button that makes the company take off definitively.
During the year 2008, Google lost shares of almost 70% of their value, going from $700 to $240 at the end of the year. This did not distract Larry Page and Sergei Brin from pursuing their project which was not tied to one year's economic results, but to building the largest and most excellent search engine in the world. Indeed, just in the month of September 2008, Google launched Android and entered the mobile market, to then launch an infinite number of applications and solutions for the business. Today his actions are worth seven times as much.
You started your company a few years before 2020. In the year 2020 your company or your project was disrupted by Coronavirus and you had to make changes, in some cases, like Zuckerberg, you had just got off of it by paying a lot of money cause, or you had just made a big investment that paved the way for you and you saw a beautiful descent ahead of you. Then suddenly Coronavirus...
Now I will tell you your story of the future: you will not give up and you will continue to pursue your great project even more than before. And, even if you do not become Musk, Zuckerberg or Page, you will still build a good company that will help many people and provide you with great personal and economic satisfaction.
If
If
If you do not get defeated by fear, do not forget, just like they did, your original project!
Although having the total guarantee that you will NEVER be discovered, benefiting economically by violating ethics will ultimately cost you more than not giving up on the advantage unethically obtained.
If despite having provided a poor service to a customer, I still manage to get paid 5,000 euros, in the end those 5,000 euros will end up costing me much more than 5000 euros.
If I find 2,500 euros on the street and I don't try to trace it back to its rightful owner, having withheld that money will cost me more than 2,500 euros.
If having to share cash with a partner, he accidentally gave me 500 euros more, not returning them, even if he never noticed, it would cost me much more than 500 euros.
What you have gained by not respecting ethics is not yours. The universe will come back to take it.
If you really want to own things you need to be able to do your best without them. Nothing is truly yours if you can't afford to lose it. In that case, you got it.
Not being able to afford to lose something is the first step towards the end: not being able to afford to lose something means that you are saying to yourself that you don't feel like you are able to rebuild it. From that moment on, the material world will possess you.
It applies to collaborators, customers, loves, companies, things.
Pay attention to one important thing: if you continue to lose money to create a happy customer, you should re-set your business architecture. There is nothing that has so much value for the economic success of any business like a customer who is really happy with what you have given to him.
The counter-intuitive principles of business are those principles which, at first glance, go against logic and which are followed by a small minority of people who clearly inherit all economic success.
Trying to decode the principles that led to business success, about 9-10 years ago I began to realize that the principles that had the power to make your company grow, almost all of them had one thing in common: they were counter-intuitive, that is at first sight contrary to logic. I became more and more passionate about the subject and, as my companies grew, I began to fill in longer and longer lists.
I understood that the present business scenario is like a puzzle that, if you play with the rules followed by everyone, you always end up losing or, after having done great laps and even imagining that you have almost won, in the end you always find yourself at the starting point: caged, insecure, at the mercy of circumstances. Practicing and researching the counter-intuitive principles of business ultimately led me to a further great discovery, which was also the discovery of my life: everything in life has a spiritual origin, but this is another more advanced discourse, for another series.
The first counter-intuitive principle that I discovered was the following: the decision to improve oneself by carrying out a practical action in that direction, has an effect on the individual which is often equally beneficial compared to the actual actions that he will put in place to do it. Your life doesn't start to improve when you read the book, your life starts to change and improve the moment you buy it. Thought (or, in this case, decision) often creates more important effects than action. Each of us, if we really want to build successful business, should become a student of all counter-intuitive practices and principles.