Merry Christmas America

The incredible people of this country continue to amaze me.

Each month, I mentor a group of small business leaders here in my hometown of Fort Collins. Our meetings are under the umbrella of a company called Loco Think Tank. Curt Bear, its founder and director, has been a lifelong friend. He was my banker when I was building houses, and we have both seen each other work our way in and out of success and failure in our small business endeavors. Years ago, he said he wanted to set up a peer-to-peer advisory group for small businesses. He’s worked hard to make Loco one of the best ones in our area. We get into the nitty-gritty of what is happening within the walls of our operations. What do our numbers look like? How are our employee relations? How are our marketing efforts going? Each member of the group acts as a member of a board of directors, giving advice and looking at ways that we can improve our performance.

I said to my group this month at our meeting how much I admire each of them. We had just been through a round of rolling 24-hour blackouts from Xcel Energy, and in the Christmas season, losing a day can be so devastating. One of our members recounted that she had been at a restaurant when it first started. There was no way for the establishment's owner to collect payment. Their point of sale was down, and in our ever-increasing reliance on computers for calculations and payment processing, he had no way to collect for the dinners he had just served. I said to my group, “Small business gets up every day and puts on a sixty-pound pack and steps up to the starting line of a hundred-yard race, and the corporations and deep pockets of the new consolidated landscape in business get a hundred-yard head start. But small businesses believe so fervently in what they are doing that they head to the line anyway.”

That should be celebrated in America.

I know that it’s complicated out there. We feel it all the time. The struggles are very real for the person trying to make a living from the work they do. There seems to be a new trouble around every corner. But people sign up every day to try again. That inconcoruble spirit is contagious, it’s deep in the fabric of what makes our country work, and it’s beautiful.

When we started this publication a few weeks ago, we never imagined that we would see a landscape in America of people who are trying as hard as they are. The news and the doom and gloom of the glass portals to hell we all scroll through each day would indicate that everyone has given up, taken their shattered dreams to the corner, and sunken into misery. But it isn’t true in the slightest. Every day, we discover a new group or person who is trying something incredible. I thought that spirit of ambition was dead in the 21st century, but it may be as healthy as ever. As the business climate has become more difficult and the paperwork has piled higher, people are finding ways around all of it. The rumbling underneath all of the frustrations is a spirit of doubled-down perseverance and desire to reinvent the ways we see and define success. People are taking their futures into their own hands. They aren’t interested in what the corporate versions of America are offering. They have taken to their garage or their computer and are moonlighting a new world into existence. It’s truly beautiful.

I am quite tired of feeling like there are no good things out there, and that the future is some kind of sanitized version of Mad Max. Instead, I have found incredible encouragement in the stories we have already highlighted and those to come. I want to tell people that this all still works. I know that the challenges exist, and that it continues to get harder as the machine grows, but what I see happening in the lives of people who have resolved to try things a different way is a better and more beautiful version of America. When someone gives up a good, steady job in the media to make their own future, that means that the nuggets they’ve been offered no longer entice them into complacency and serving someone else’s dreams. When the young man who is making guitars decides that he’s going to take the advice of those around him who keep reminding him “not to miss his children growing up” and quit his aerospace job to build gorgeous electric guitars, that lifts my spirits. It means that people are waking up to the realization that they have all the talents they need to remake the world.

In that quiet act of disobedience to the “normal,” they are showing everyone who wants to look, that there is a path to change the country's trajectory. I love what I am seeing, and it is so encouraging to me that the spirit of tenacity that has always been a part of the American ethos is still there. This is a Christmas to celebrate the good things happening. There will undoubtedly be a lot of shifting and instability as these changes take place, but I love that it’s coming from a place of hopeful ambition instead of pitchforks.

Thanks to those who have already subscribed, and I would love to have you share this with friends who you know need to hear that things are not nearly as troubled as they might think. Merry Christmas, and I can’t wait to show you what we’re seeing. You are going to be stunned at all of the good news in America.