I’m not much of a stock market guy, but I have periodically bought shares of companies I believe in. One of those is Yahoo!. I think their content strategy resonates with most people, and we each have at least one “channel” we could return to daily.
The last year was pretty bad for YHOO, the stock. My investment was minimal, so I haven’t lost much money. I have lost a little bit of faith in the company. At every turn, their excuse is the delayed launch of their new advertising system, “Panama.”
This reminds me of a future-bound personal rut we’ve probably all succumbed to in some way:
- Life will be different when I start driving.
- It’ll all be better once high school is over
- Well, I just need to get through college…
- Once I have a job…
- First I need a house
- After the first million, I’ll relax
The answer is to live in the now. As new-agey as it seems (though I mean it as a Wayne’s World reference), it solves the personal rut, and gets the focus off some silver bullet. There rarely are silver bullets that make everything perfect. Panama won’t be one.
Brad Feld says Yahoo! should “take a shot this time at being bold (rather than just follow ‘slow and steady execution’) if they really want to assault Google this time around.” That sounds like in the now thinking. Way.
That’s wise. I’ve found myself falling into the temptation of saying: “someday this will be different…” why not make it different now?