In all of this, we hear talk of Main Street and Wall Street. To this point, the rescue packages, the stimulus packages, the bailout packages, have gone to Wall Street, with very little directed toward Main Street—the small businesses and ordinary people who are being dragged down with little hope of immediate rescue.

What I want to focus on is the contrast between two types of stories. One story teaches us to hope for rescue. The other story teaches us to be heroic and rescue ourselves.

Let’s start with the stories that teach us to wait for rescue. From earliest childhood, we have been taught to hope for a savior. The movies and TV shows have taught us that rescue will come, usually at the last minute, in the nick of time. The cavalry will ride over the hill. Reinforcements will arrive. The knight in shining armor will show up and we will be saved.

The hope of being rescued touches a deep psychological need for all of us. We hope that someone will help. Someone will care. Someone will do something to solve the problem.

Christian religion has made salvation a central promise of the gospel message. You are lost. You are hopeless. You are struggling. God sends a savior, to rescue you, because you cannot rescue yourself.

Twelve step programs teach that we are incapable of saving ourselves from our addictions. We need help. We need a higher power. We need to be rescued.

In other words, we hope for a hero to save us.

In all of this, I don’t mean to undermine, diminish, or challenge the idea that sometimes  we really do need help. We really do need rescue. We really do need to be saved. If you fall off an ocean liner in the ocean,  you will need someone to throw you a lifeline, to haul you back in.
 
But that fact that we sometimes need to be rescued, does not mean that we always need to be rescued.

In heroic stories, the hero is the one who finds a way to solve the problem. Sometimes the hero rescues others. Often, the hero has to rescue herself or himself. No one saves the hero. The hero is the one who does the saving.

And this leads me to my point. especially now, when the economic crises pile up day after day. When things seem to get worse and worse, this is the time to be heroic about your situation. Rather than wait for rescue, resolve to find a way to rescue yourself.

The unofficial entrepreneur’s motto is:  “If it is to be, it is up to me.” 
This single belief is the real distinctive of true entrepreneurs. They don’t wait for permission, approval, or help. If they are in trouble, they act to save themselves.

The real danger right now is for everyone in financial trouble—which includes millions of people—is to wait for the savior to come. These are tough times and they require commitment, determination, and a plan of action.

I wrote a book with a man who faced a financial crisis and did exactly that. He made a commitment to get himself out of his financial crisis, with focus, passion, and motivated action. In the process, he created a formula for the essential elements of financial freedom. Find out the formula that saved him from financial ruin at here.

Maybe the government will find a way to bail out Main Street, and solve your financial problems. But don’t wait for it. Most of us do not fall into the category of “too big to fail.”  This means that the only real salvation will come from saving ourselves.

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson

One of the primary reasons for the economic crisis is that banks have abused their ability to create money out of thin air.  Find out how banks create money in No Money Limits For Real Estate Investors:  Discover The Money-Making Secret In The Real Estate Game That Transforms Your Money Struggles Into Financial Abundance, Winner of 2007 National Best Books Award in Business: Real Estate Category.

One of the enduring beliefs in American society is that people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and succeed if they work hard and persevere.

Today, the Associated Press published an article that claims that people are losing faith in this belief. It asks the question:  “Is everything spinning out of control?”

“The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country’s sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.”  (Read the whole article at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25311529/ )

There are many reasons to feel powerless. The news is full of heart-wrenching stories about 500 year floods, massive earthquakes, and devastating typhoons.

The economic news consists of more bad news after bad news. Gas prices are over $4.00. The price of corn has reached $8 a bushel. A loaf of good bread will set you back another $4.00.

Meanwhile, the biggest banks are laying off employees. Foreclosed houses sit on the market. People lose equity in their homes.

At times like these, it is easy to be discouraged and to lose heart. And these are the times when it is especially important to choose the hero’s path rather than to sit on the couch and lament how bad it is.

These are the times when a hero takes on the challenge to act when acting requires courage and determination in the face of many obstacles.

In one of my favorite hero’s journey stories, the silly/profound movie, “Joe Versus The Volcano,” Joe makes the statement. “I am my only hope for a hero.”

Don’t let yourself be swamped by bad news. And don’t look outside yourself for a hero to rescue you. This is the time to be your own hero about money.

Back in my gardening days, I used to live in New England. I used to think that the most successful crop in my garden were the granite rocks deposited by ancient glaciers, granite rocks that had to be pried out of the cold ground, and deposited with the others in the rock wall at the edge of the property. No matter how many I had pried out the year before, each spring thaw heaved another crop of rocks into my garden.

It’s hard work to plant a garden, but spring is the time of promise. There is something about a new beginning at the end of a long, hard winter to motivate hard work. Each year it’s the same. You repeat the magic ritual of planting seeds and setting out small plants, carefully placing them into the earth with the ardent expectation that they will grow and flourish. You imagine the garden in its fullness even as you dig in the bare ground.

And then the summer solstice brings the summer season. And with the change in season, you face a different kind of work. You have to tend what you have planted.

Summer work is tending, weeding, hoeing. And it means working when the sun is hot, or when the sky is so perfectly blue that you want to quit working and go off to play.

Summer is the time when it is easy to quit. You tell yourself that it is too hot, too buggy, or too humid. Or it is so beautiful that you want to go swim in the lake or go for a picnic in the woods. The famous fable of the ant and the grasshopper catches the temptation to stop working in the summer.

Summer is the real test of persistence for all of us. Most of us can begin our projects, with hope and hard work. The capacity to persist in the middle of summer divides the beginners from the finishers. Who wants to be out weeding the garden in the hot sun?  Yet weeding the garden in summer is an essential step to producing an abundant crop.
 
This is the lifecycle of any creative project. Every project has a beginning, a middle, and an end, just as any dramatic story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Middles are always the hardest to sustain because they are not as exciting as beginnings and endings.

In the classic “hero’s journey” story structure, the first act sets the scene, introduces the characters, and sets the hero out on the journey. In the third act, the hero has a final confrontation with the primary antagonist that either ends triumphantly or tragically. In either case, the hero is permanently changed.

The middle act lasts as long as the first act and the third act put together. In this act, the hero keeps enduring in the face of obstacle after obstacle. The middle act is the hardest to write. The middle act shows the hero slogging along between the bold beginning and the final brave resolution.

Look at the blockbuster trilogy movies. Star Trek (the early ones,) The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix. Each movie is one act in a three-part drama. The middle movie of such trilogies tends to be the darkest and the most problematic. And typically, the middle movie is the least satisfying of the trilogy, resulting in bad reviews and unfavorable comparisons to the excitement of the first-act movie. It’s hard to be a hero in the middle of the journey, and it’s not as much fun to watch. Yet the middle act is essential to the structure of the drama. The hero who faces the antagonist at the climax of the movie has earned the right by persisting through the trials of the middle.

In the seasons of the year, summer is the middle act. It’s fun to plant in the spring. It’s not much fun to weed and hoe in summer. Yet, the harvest in the fall depends on what happens in the summer. The heroic task of summer is to stick with it, even when you would rather be doing something else.

The true mark of the hero is the willingness to keep on keeping on. This is also the true mark of any successful person who finishes any creative project, whether it is writing a book or building a business or anything else that requires sustained effort over a long period of time. You keep on keeping on, even when you would rather be doing something else. The word for this is “persistence.”

The famous quotation by Calvin Coolidge expresses the reasons why persistence is such an essential characteristic for success.
 
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

And so at the beginning of summer, when the days are long and the temptations are great, the question is, “What did you begin in the spring that you need to sustain in the summer to harvest your reward in the fall?”  The essential requirement for making money of a money hero is persistence, even in the long, hot days after the summer solstice.

Kalinda Rose Stevenson, PhD