People who want to be successful in life should learn the story of "Who Moved My Cheese." It is about rats who every day take the train to Cheese Station X (or something like that), where they find and devour cheese. One day, however, the cheese is gone. No more cheese.
Some rats became distraught when their cheese was gone. They whined, they cried, they complained. They wrote newspaper stories about how Wall Street wrote bad loans using the cheese as collateral. They complained that too much cheese was exported to pay for foreign oil. They blamed terrorists for blowing up the cheese.
Many opinion makers sensed the pain of the rats who were distraught over the lost cheese. They wrote blogs saying that never before has there been a larger discrepancy between how much cheese rich and poor rats eat. They said America is yesterday's news, already a failed nation. They offered advice on how to cope with hunger. They occupied Cheese Station X complaining about gluttony.
A few rats decided to look for cheese elsewhere rather than keep going to Station X , where the cheese used to be. They looked at Cheese Station Z but no cheese there. They looked at Cheese Stations C, then Cheese Station V, and so on. After a few years of intensive searching, they found a mother lode of cheese at Cheese Station O. Because of an earthquake many years ago, the cheese was under the station hidden from view but it was enough to feed everybody.
The United States has a free capitalist system that has produced unsurpassed wealth. Every so often financial excesses cause severe economic recessions. In 2008 the USA economy tanked. Some whined and cried and bemoaned the end of capitalism and even America. They encouraged young people to think their whining and crying was justified by the foul deeds of old people. In other words, they acted just like the rats who whined when the cheese was gone.
Fortunately America has entrepreneurs in the spirit of Steven Jobs and a political system that turns these people lose. When the recession of 2008 came, America's entrepreneurs kept thinking, inventing, working, and planning. Now they are far advanced in solving the energy crisis. They are selling I-phones and I-pads throughout the world. They are building cars of the future.
America's entrepreneurs have found cheese, stupid. America is hiring, maybe not as fast as we all would like, but if we had less whining and more entrepreurship we would be hiring more. The U.S. stock market is strong. Housing is improving.
The people who found the cheese will get richer than ever before. The whiners will want to tax them more than ever before. Life goes on.
To all the young people who read PT blogs, I pose this existential question: What kind of rat do you want to be? The whiner who cries when the cheese is gone? Or the entrepreneur who works hard to find new cheese or substitutes?
Yes, I know loss hurts. Crying is okay for a day or two, but you need to build for your future or you won't have one.
