Saving The Economy

The current economic news has got everyone spooked. I see it everyday in email from my clients and subscribers. I think the correction in the real estate and investment banking markets has touched the lives of more average people than similar or worse corrections in other markets like the "dot com" meltdown a few years ago.

To top that off, with a new US president, both political rhetoric and the news media have whipped up frenzy with doom and gloom reporting. However, when you look at it closely most of us make the adjustments necessary and move on with our lives. I still see tons of people in the stores and malls on any given day. They're loading their SUVs with purchases of all types. They're driving down the freeway in hordes of traffic. Unless I had watched a gloomy report in the media I probably wouldn't know that anything was supposed to be wrong with our economy.

One of the greatest lessons learned in the Great Depression early in the 20th century was the realization that world economies are based on a system of confidence and trust. That means that every time money changes hands we trust that whomever we give our money to will deliver on either a product or service or make good on their promise to repay us the money we have given them. If for some reason we lose our confidence in the other party to a transaction we probably won't give money to them.

The lesson learned from the Great Depression was the discovery that if everyone simply quit paying attention to the 'crisis of confidence' and started applying their effort to creating new products and services that the broken economic system would start to work again. It was simply that idea that rapidly pulled the failing economy of the early 1900s into the rapidly growing economy of the mid 20th century.

While government debates and regulates band aid solutions for the system, the truth is that the real solution lies within our own heads and the way we think about our life and its economic transactions. When we change our thinking and act through our changed belief we again develop the confidence to make our economic system work.

Napoleon Hill does a good job of describing this thought process in his book "Think and Grow Rich". If you haven't read this book, there hasn't been a more appropriate time in many years to review this subject. If you would like a free copy of this work you can download it here.

It has been said that only a small percentage of the knowledge and experience of each generation is passed on to the next. The rest is left for us to learn all over again. You can greatly increase you prosperity in your life and your business by paying attention to more of the lessons learned by the previous generations.