I had one exceptionally difficult teacher in grade school. To this day, I don’t regret the experience. She taught me a lot, but I do remember a specific instance where she embarrassed me in front of the class by telling me that what I had put in a report was wrong.
The topic was diabetes, which I was familiar with because my grandfather had the disease. In fact, so did one of my classmates, and I had learned a lot (for fifth grade in a pre-internet world) about the subject.After the teacher had embarrassed me, it turned out that I was right.
I didn’t realize it until I was much older, but the event stuck with me. As I’ve grown older (and somewhat wiser) I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a difficult balance between believing what you know(think) to be true versus what other people in positions of authority tell you to be true.
I’m a cynic, hard headed, and generally anti-authoritarian, so my nature is to question pretty much everything. But clearly, I don’t know everything, and I often need to rely on the advice of others.
Which brings me to the current health crisis. How will the Corona Virus (COVID-19) affect small business owners? I have no idea! However,I have some general thoughts on the matter:
- There are people who will benefit from promoting crisis. It is best, in my humble experience, to figure out who gains from the information you’re provided and filter out that information that is unhelpful.
- There are elements of the truth in what “they” say, but it’s just not clear what’s truth and what’s fiction.
- I don’t trust any government to tell me the truth, least of all closed governments like the Chinese. So how bad is it really? Who knows?
- There are significantly more pressing matters for small business owners in the US. How to find and retain competent people and dealing with the onslaught of technological change being two that come to mind.
- We’re due for a bad outbreak of disease from ahistorical perspective. Is this virus the BIG ONE? Don’t know, and frankly I don’t care. The things that are likely to kill me are mostly ones that are linked to my behavior(heart disease and cancer). I’ll stick to things I can control thank you.
If you really do want to fixate on the health crisis de jour then go directly to the experts and find out. In fact, this is great advice no matter the subject. For God’s sake don’t Google the answer!
