In 2007, a software sales professional friend of mine and I commiserated with each other over our shared conservatism toward money, that kept us sitting on the sidelines, out of highly leveraged real estate investments pyramided one atop the other. We both knew the same fellow, somebody half as smart as either of us and less industrious, who was making $100,000.00 to $150,000.00 each time he bought and flipped a pre-construction high rise condo contract, then using that profit to tie up three, then that to tie up nine. It is, of course, all gone now. The sunny clime buried in a blizzard of bad paper. Never taking any chips away from the table and parlaying every wager as if the idiotic appreciation and frenzied buying would never end came to a conclusion I’d predicted from day one. It took a little longer than I’d envisioned. But neither of us envies his easy profits now.

The obvious point is that most of what we see shining from afar is covered with grit and grime when you get up close, and is often really nasty if you get inside. It is easy to envy the illusion. Comparing your own situation to the fiction of others’ is certain path to real disaffection and discouragement, but to what end? It’s also easy to envy the temporary, the star of the moment for whom success greater than yours appears to be so easily obtained.

But the teams that look best early in the season are not necessarily those winning late and through the play-offs. In a small snapshot of a brief window in time, we can make just about anything seem smart – even lending to people without ability to pay, even pyramiding debt and calling it income.

It is usually best, as Tom Peters observed about the behavior of ‘the excellent’, to stick to YOUR knitting. To invest in what you know and understand, including yourself. To “focus tight” on your business, your products, and your customers – the economy you can make and mold and largely control through your own initiative and imagination. A new year is upon us, in some ways, just the rollover of an artificial, made-up page in a calendar; it must occur for the calendar business to exist. But in other ways, an inspiration, a motivation, to re-think priorities, renew energies; re-make the world around you to your preferences. While everything seems changed, nothing has changed: we still prosper one good customer relationship created and sustained after another after another, multiplied as best and as rapidly as resources permit.