“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” – Maria Robinson
It’s hard for me to believe that 2020 is half over. I think all the usual benchmarks from the past few months that usually tell me the year is passing by have been cancelled or postponed or quarantined. It seems like the last school year never really ended, and now things are getting going for the next one.
So many things have happened during the first half of 2020 that none of us would have ever expected, and most of those things were either bad or led to uncertainty or both. Very few people I meet today feel comfortable with either their businesses or their lives in general.
We can’t undo anything that’s happened so far in 2020 (that’s true regardless of the year, but it’s especially worth remember this year). What we can do is focus on what we’re going to do with the second half of the year. What will we make out of this chaos and the opportunities that come with it?
I’m not suggesting that the second half of 2020 will be easy. There are going to continue to be disruptions and uncertainty. I’ve been wrong on virtually every prediction I’ve made so far this year, so I’m not even going to try. I just know things will probably feel unsettled for a while.
All that said, we can’t just sit here and do nothing. We can impact what happens to ourselves and our businesses. What critical things can you accomplish in 2020? What significant changes or adaptations can you make? Think about how you serve your customers, how you make the product or service you sell, or even what you sell.
Whether it be in terms of knowledge or markets or anything else, there are opportunities right now for virtually every business out there. I’m reminded on an almost daily basis of a business owner we’ve been lucky enough to work with for several years. He owns several restaurants, which were among the hardest hit this spring. And yet, throughout the last 3+ months, he’s had the best attitude of anybody I’ve been around. They made a number of changes, adapted on the fly, started doing things they never thought possible, and are not only surviving, but thriving.
How will you do that? What are you going to do over the next 6 months so that five years from now you can look back on 2020 and see that it was the year where things really started to come together. You can’t change what’s happened so far, but you can start changing what’s going to happen next. Get to work.
