He Did – Why Can’t You?

 

It’s Easter Sunday, the day when Christians around the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whilst Easter tends to get overshadowed by Christmas and we think of Easter as a great day for chocolate eggs, it is in fact the most important festival in the Christian faith. This is the festival that commemorates the key point of Christianity – namely the fact that Jesus overcame death and following Jesus was the only way to everlasting life.

This is the only well-known record of anyone coming back from the dead in the last two thousand two hundred years and its likely to be the only one of its kind. However, whilst it’s highly unlikely anyone else is going to come back from the dead in a literal sense, the art of coming back from the dead in the metaphorical sense is going to be something many of us will need to master.

Just look at the last five-years, where we’ve been hit by events nobody could have predicted. It started with technological disruption that was changing industries. Then we got hit by a global pandemic that shut down the world and now we have a war in Europe, a continent that expects peace and prosperity to be a given, that has the potential to become a world war.

All these events have ended “life as we know it” for many people around the world. Ending “life as we know it” is likely to happen to an increasing number of people. The life that you know today can be terminated by events beyond your control. So, what can you do about it?

As with most things, the starting point is being aware of your own proverbial mortality. Regardless of what you do for a living, you can be replaced and the life that you know will come to an end. Once you accept that that you can and will be replaced if your employer has a chance to, you are more likely to anticipate and prepare for it.

One of the most damaging phrases in East Asia is “Iron Rice Bowl.” It gives people the idea that what they need to do is to get into a certain profession and work for a certain employer and they’ll never have to worry about where the next meal comes from in as much as the monthly cheque and pension payments are guaranteed. The idea of the iron rice bowl made working for multinationals and to a larger extent, the bureaucracy all the more valuable. Entrepreneurship was something for the few and taking on the bureaucracy and large corporations is frowned upon.

Whilst East Asia has been the centre of much the global economic growth in the last few decades, this mentality has proven to be a crutch. As was seen in the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, what prosperity that was gained in the region was dependent on Western innovation and Western markets. East Asia was only prospering because it was doing things cheaper than the West and when Western money markets (specifically Bonds) chose not to smile on Asia, the party collapsed.

The second point is that this mentality has psychologically damaged generations. Think of Japan, which was the most feared economy. When the boom times ended in the 1990s, a generation of Japanese salarymen, who had grown up with the concept of working for a single paternalistic employer for life got stuck. Life as they knew it ended and Japan’s suicide rate in 1995 started to spike. Something similar happened in South Korea at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, when South Korea was one of the hardest hit nations during the Asian Financial crisis.

 

 Taken from Wikipedia

Accepting that your professional life can end abruptly makes you prepare for it. If you know that your main source of income can evaporate overnight, makes you understand the need to have alternatives. One of the most prominent examples in the last week came from the Canadian actor Simon Liu, who found fame and fortune in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” The impetus to get into Hollywood came from the fact that he was a failed accountant who got fired by Deloitte’s. His safe and respectable job wasn’t giving him happiness, which meant he probably wasn’t much good at it. Being fired ended the life he knew and he had to be “reborn” into something that made him happy. The story can be found at:

https://radiichina.com/simu-liu-from-accountant-to-marvel-superhero/

 

 However, whilst we should be grateful that Deloitte saved Simon Liu from being a mediocre accountant and helped propel his movie career, most of us should rush to terminate jobs. We should prepare for it by doing things like having a side-hustle and financial investments that can provide a secondary source of revenue. As they say, “only fire your boss when you can afford to do so.”

For me, whilst my corporate career never really took off, I’ve always looked at having more than one job. Hence, when possible, I wait tables. I’m also trying to get more readership and therefore more advertising revenue for this blog. Sure, waiting tables pays badly but even if I get $50 a month, its still $50 a month more than what I would have had otherwise. Same goes for the blog. It took me six-years to make $155 in advertising revenue but it was still $155 more than I would have had otherwise.

I’ve been lucky in the sense that my day job boss allows me to work a second job, so I turn I try and return the favour by trying to develop business through the people I meet in the menial jobs. My various hustles, which may never pay me much, do provide me with content to write about.

Change is constant and events in the last five years have only served to underline that fact. The sooner we except that life as we know it could end at any moment, the more likely we are to be able to adapt and build a new life for ourselves. Jesus rose from the dead to show us that we could achieve a better life than the earthly life we have. We need to understand and be prepared to accept that the life we have could end anytime and we need to be prepared to make a better one.