Risk You Can Believe In
We understand that there is no aspect of life that is risk free. Beyond the obvious personal risks (mountain climbing, sky-diving, drug running, marriage), every human activity carries some degree of risk.
In the extended era of post World War II inflation, money has continually lost purchasing power. Therefore, just staying even involves risk at some level. For business owners and self-employed professionals, the safest and most satisfying investment will be to invest in yourself rather than putting your money in the hands of financial advisors. This means expanding or refining products and services with self-generated revenues rather than by taking on loans and carrying debt.
Whatever the trade or profession, the strategies are analogous. Every extra buck and spare minute of time is reinvested in more knowledge, deeper vision, and intensified drive. While it’s not quite true that if you do what you love the finances will take care of themselves, it is true that the more skilled anyone becomes at any trade, art or profession, the greater the odds that life will provide opportunities to practice it at some level.
On the most basic, with mouths to feed, bills to pay and wolves to keep from the door, compromises may be necessary, but they need not be permanent or unproductive. In mid-career the pianist Hank Jones, who played with Coleman Hawkins, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman and other jazz legends, was forced to work as a staff musician at CBS for 15 years during an era when jazz had become unfashionable.
“Most of the time … I wasn’t playing the kind of music I’d prefer to play,” Mr. Jones said. Post CBS, Jones resurrected his career, bringing it to new creative heights, gaining wide recognition and recording prolifically until his death at age 91.
However unwelcome the CBS experience had been, Jones explained that it had given him “an economic base for trying to build something.” The moral of the story: even compromises and setbacks can be productive as long as the drive to succeed is not lost.
“If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days, the critics notice it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it,” proclaimed Ignacy Jan Paderewski, renowned pianist, composer and the third Prime Minister of Poland.
Regards,
Gerald Celente
for The Daily Reckoning
[Editor’s Note: The above essay is excerpted from The Trends Journal, which is published by Gerald Celente. The Trends Journal distills the ongoing research of The Trends Research Institute into a concise, readily accessible form. Click here to learn more about and subscribe to The Trends Journal.]
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