What does 2009 hold for you?

Business sentiment is astonishingly low at the moment. The experts are predicting worse to come and companies and individuals are preparing for the worst. I believe its truly a shame that businesses and individuals are being scared into contraction, cutting staff, cutting spend and told to prepare for the worst.

Yes times will be tough but frightening the population into believing apocalypse will hit sometime this year is by no means helping the matter. To see special documentaries, extended news coverage and dedicated newspaper lift-outs litter our surroundings doesn’t instill us with a great deal of confidence. Sure we cut down, people don’t eat out as much, hold back on that new pair of shoes and forgo this year’s holiday. The sad bi-product of doing this is that those cost savings are also costing other people money and are detrimental to the economy, further extending and prolonging the downturn. I wrote a blog post about this a little while ago that brushed upon this idea.

So what will you be doing this year? Where have your personal or business costs been cropped? What will you do with your spare time as your no longer working on that new project or upgrade? Seth Godin has a great theory on how to use this ’slack’. I recommend you take this on board and think of what you can do. Hopefully this time will see the development of new skills, thoughts and ideas. It may bring upon a new Google or Facebook or make the world friendlier and smaller in some way or another.

I urge you to learn something new and use it to grow so that at least you can really say you learnt from this experience.