Life After Disaster
Have you ever had to face a disaster in you life or your business? I’ll bet you are thinking of many. Disasters come in many sizes from petty annoyances to unspeakable catastrophes. They also come to all of us at one time or another. I have heard it said that we are either just coming out of a crisis or just about to enter into one. It is also true that the way that we handle crisis determines our future.
Most of us experience some form of shock immediately following a disaster. This happened to me recently when I woke up and turned on my computer and realized that my hard drive had crashed. I did everything I could to recover my data but it was so damaged that everything was lost. Three years of work was simply gone. It made me think of people who have lost all of their belongings in natural disasters. While my mini disaster in no way compares to the horrendous losses that many have suffered it still left me in a state of shock.
How could this happen was my first question. If you are reading this and you are not consistently backing up your data. STOP READING NOW! BACK UP YOUR DATA IMMEDIATELY! It is that important.
Once I got over the shock of my loss I realized that if my business was to survive I would need to take decisive action. I really could not afford the luxury of mourning all that I had lost.
When Thomas Edison was 65 years old, his factory with all of his life’s work was destroyed by fire. At the time he was only insured for ten cents on the dollar because his buildings were made of brick which were thought to be fire proof. Thomas Edison not only lost millions of dollars that night, he also lost the work of a lifetime.
On the night that his factory burnt down he told his son that there is a wonderful thing that happens when we loose everything. It gives us an opportunity to start over without any of the mistakes of yesterday. Three months later he invented and released the first phonograph.
I hope that this story will give you hope when you face the inevitable next crisis that comes into your life. I have great hope. I am taking positive action and I am looking forward with high expectation to an amazing future.