You are your best investment.
The best investment you can make is your in self. That’s what I’ve taken to telling myself and the countless family and friends who have been laid off, and after months of being on unemployment aren’t seeing any real opportunities coming their way. “It’s one thing if there are interviews,” one friend told me, “but when you don’t even have the hope of that after hours and hours of job hunting, it gets kind of depressing.” Yes, yes it does, I agree with that.
I’ve been laid off probably seven times, usually from small businesses, who were on their way out of business. I recall one job as a graphic designer where the electricity was turned off, and I lost all of an intense (and ill-advised) Photoshop layout, over one hundred and fifty layers. When the bill was finally paid and the electricity was turned back on I went at it again, and you know what it was a better design and came together more quickly, but that’s hardly the moral of the story, because in fact I was laid off a month later… didn’t see that one coming — HA!.
Being laid off sucks! It diminishes your self-worth, poisons your outlook on life, makes you resentful, and generally is just a sad time; unfortunately these feelings only intensify proportionate to the time you’re without a job or the hope of any kind of gainful employment. The suck train just keeps a rollin’… until you reach a point where you either crack, roll over and give up, or you decide that you’re not going to be a victim of bad times and you need to take control of the only thing you can, yourself. It’s no surprise that more millionaires were made during the Great Depression than any other time. The fight or flight instincts take over, and you decide I’m going to do fix this, I can do this for myself, and you do. You do, because the best investment you can make is in yourself!
