Seth Godin in August 2020: The Difference between leaders and managers

Business people everywhere are freaking out over all the change that's been thrown at them in the last 5 months.  Seth Godin has been telling business people about the change that's coming for about 35 years.  His blog has 7,000 posts or something like that.  He's written 20 books.  He's been trying new ideas and failing, and having some great successes the whole time.  

This podcast interview goes all over the place, in a good way.  But some big themes of it, where Seth has great insights, are the difference between being a leader, and being a manager.  There's a lot of change now, it's a good time to be a leader.  Another theme of this interview, is that artists and creative people are leaders.  They may not have a huge organization, but they open up "new territory" in some way.  Other people follow.

Another big theme of this interview, is the difference between talent and skill.  Are you willing to put in the time to learn whatever skills you need, in today's world? The concept "talent" is really overrated.  More than anything, a good talk with Seth Godin is full of all kinds of insights, and one or two of them may be exactly the insights you needed to hear today, to move forward in today's weird and fast changing business world.

"We're living with a whole bunch of revolutions at once." 

-Seth Godin, in this interview

Financial Never Never Land... a new blog for new times

Over 42 million Americans have lost their jobs in about three months.  The stock markets plummeted in February and March 2020, as a 100 year pandemic, the Covid-19 virus, made its way into the United States, and spread rapidly.  Most businesses face a mandatory shutdown, and now millions of small businesses are struggling, most major corporations were close to insolvency in March, and tens of millions of Americans are suddenly struggling to simply pay their rent. 

It's June 21, 2020, as I write this post.  We're in weird times.  REALLY weird times.  Economics and Big Picture social dynamics is something I've had an interest in for many years, going back to high school in the 1980's.  I saw part of what's happening now coming, major economic and social issues, and wrote about them to some extent, in my previous blog.  But the Covid-19 pandemic was something I did not expect to be in the mix, and it helped shift the other issues into light speed mode.  Things are happening much faster than eve I expected.

 I first coined the term "The Phoenix Great Depression" in a blog post, last December (2019), I believe.  That's a term that popped in my head while trying to make sense of several long term trends I was watching.  As some of the things I'd been writing about for three years started happening, like the massive stock market drop and subsequent recession (possibly a depression already, if we see a 10% drop in GDP).  Over the past couple of months, I came to think of this decade we're entering as the "Tumultuous 2020's."  That's because I believe we're just at the beginning of the incredbily chaotic times, as opposed to the simply chaotic times of the last decade or so.

So many things are happening so fast right now, and I was retiring my previous personal blog, after hitting the 100,000 page view threshold, that I decided this new blog was in order.  In this blog I will collect articles, news clips, and interviews from people I think are sharing key insights going forward.  I will also share my personal views, which are a Big Picture context for all the craziness going on these days.  Hopefully this will help many of you make sense of today's Never Never Land economy, social upheaval, and chaos, and also help you find ways to make dollars from all the opportunities, as things get weirder.