Even the lowest hanging fruits, in terms of easy opportunities that require relatively less effort and promise marginally higher returns, can look unattractive when the broader environment is experiencing widespread turbulence.
I think it's more of a human nature thing to second-guess every decision and see risk where opportunity once stood clearly visible.
That's why these are the types of situations where I tend to separate the perceived macro realities of doom and gloom out of said opportunities standing on their own without this ominous background.
By that, I mean disentangling what's actually in front of me from the narrative fog that surrounds it.
On one part, the bleak economic realities are echoed both by the media and everyday people who keep mentioning rising prices and other related issues affecting their living standards.
A collective anxiety that permeates every conversation about money/work and future planning. Although not always, it's not that uncommon too for me to attend a public gathering and not encounter this shared pessimism cultural zeitgeist of economic dread that feels almost contagious.
Experientially, I feel a bit detached from what's supposedly happening around me in this domain, living in my own bubble of sorts that is primarily made up of exploring interesting viable projects and tangible opportunities that haven't evaporated despite what the sentiment indices suggest.
A bit of a paradox also with consumers continue spending robustly despite expressing gloomy economic outlook , I guess what people say they feel and what they actually do can diverge dramatically, sometimes.
I'm not going to pass on an opportunity just because a storm is supposedly coming and the likelihood of recession is being debated by economists who have been wrong before. History is littered with fortunes built during periods of collective hesitation, e.g entrepreneurs who moved forward while others froze.
The tough job is maintaining conviction and a possible doable task here is as mentioned above in evaluating opportunities on their individual merits rather than through the distorting lens of macroeconomic anxiety.
Does this specific opportunity have strong fundamentals? Does it solve a real problem? Can I execute it with my current resources?
Such questions matter infinitely more in the short to medium term than whether consumer confidence has tumbled to its lowest level since whatever month that was, I think.
The reality is that economic environments are never uniformly good or bad.
Some industries thrive precisely when others struggle, i.e,. discount retailers during downturns, cybersecurity when digital threats escalate, insolvency consulting, it's something new that I've learned while looking for "evergreen" industries.
As a conclusion, I'm leaning into thinking that opportunities that might have seemed obvious a year ago now carry the psychological weight of swimming against the current because of the broader economic pessimism saturating public discourse, but that weight is largely illusory IF the fundamentals still remain sound.
Choose to evaluate each path forward based on its intrinsic merit, independent of whether the broader narrative feels optimistic or pessimistic.
That's not to say I'll ignore context, i.e macroeconomic conditions definitely matter, however I refuse to let ambient anxiety become the primary decision-making mode.
Storms that never arrive have claimed more potential than the ones that actually hit.
Thanks for reading!! Share your thoughts below on the comments.
