When you borrow a lot of money to create a false prosperity, you import the future into the present. It isn't the actual future so much as some grotesque silicon version of it. Leverage buys you a glimpse of a prosperity you haven't really earned. Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair magazine
Like most deep truths, this one is instructive across many areas of life. For instance, I think many entrepreneurs (you could also substitute "corporate change agents") are so hungry for "prosperity" -- for the validation of seeing your idea adopted, of having people talk about your product, of winning deals, of a large staff -- that they are often tempted into thinking money can significantly accelerate the path to genuine success for the project. But, we've seen more than a few raise money, blow it in a vain (interesting word choice) attempt to import the future into the present, and get ejected when the natural pace of the market did not immediately and permanently reshape itself to their desires.
I love traveling to places where the frenetic pace of post-modern life has not crept in. You don't have to go far to find them. Two hours outside any big city in world -- Paris, London, Denver, San Fran, Boston, Seattle, Toronto -- you can find people who still see with perfect clarity that Life has a rhythm and Nature a cadence. Go, watch, remember. These places are not foreign; they are True.
In all our striving, we need to remember that we are working at the margins; there are very real limits to how fast we can change the world. What makes the world-changers great people is NOT that they had a flash of brilliance and changed the world overnight. That's an adolescent view of greatness. What makes the world-changers great people is that they were able to influence and shape and move the massive collective of all-of-us over time, through persistence and charisma and patience and compromise and energy and tenacity and forgiveness and a hundred other virtues.
Shortcuts suck.
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Posted by: Scott | March 22, 2009 at 09:38 AM