Four Reasons to Love the Recession
Tough times, great lessons
By David Porush, CEO
Last night I saw Doug Leone, senior partner at Sequoia Capital and the VC largely responsible for their good bets on Yahoo, Google, and YouTube, address a crowd of MIT students and alums. Among his many great and startling comments was, “I love a good recession.”
It got me thinking. Going for top-paying engineering and science majors (see story at right) is surely a good move. But this recession has other lessons beyond hard work and good grades and rational career choices that we should carry with us long after it’s over. If the sparks of recovery grow into a real flame, then especially for those of you who were smart, stayed in school, and weathered the storm, it will be easy to miss some of the valuable, if difficult, takeaways from these times.
1. Define what’s most essential and focus on it: Here at MentorNet we used the occasion to look really hard at the fundamental values of our mission: diversify the engineering and science workforce, help those who need help, build bridges between wisdom and talent, give people a place to express their highest motives of aspiration and generosity.
2. Trim the fat, save your cash: Americans, typically miserable at it, are now saving their money more than ever. Apply this wisdom of the crowd to your careers and businesses. MentorNet reduced staff, moved all our operations to the Cloud, and found new headquarters at half the rent.
3. To meet your material goals, embrace spiritual (or at least non-material) ones. Searching for the meaning of your connection to the world and others magically reduces the number of things you think you need. I promise.
4. Now’s the best time to take risks, especially that biggest risk of all: bet on yourself. When you’re besieged by difficulties, you’re competing against many more qualified desperados like yourself, and you’re scraping along the bottom, remember (a) you have a shorter distance to fall, and (b) nothing will distinguish you more quickly than passion.
MentorNet Mentioned in New Book
Cases on Online Tutoring, Mentoring, and Educational Services: Practices and Applications by Gary A. Berg, PhD, is now available from IGI Global. Click
here to order a copy.
