{"id":102,"date":"2009-08-16T16:51:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-16T21:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/?p=102"},"modified":"2009-08-16T16:51:00","modified_gmt":"2009-08-16T21:51:00","slug":"trillion-is-the-new-billion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/2009\/08\/trillion-is-the-new-billion\/","title":{"rendered":"&quot;Trillion is the new billion&quot;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe style=\"WIDTH: 120px; HEIGHT: 240px\" marginheight=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/rcm.amazon.com\/e\/cm?t=instituteforl-20&amp;o=1&amp;p=8&amp;l=as1&amp;asins=0972058702&amp;fc1=000000&amp;IS2=1&amp;lt1=_blank&amp;m=amazon&amp;lc1=0000FF&amp;bc1=000000&amp;bg1=FFFFFF&amp;f=ifr\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" align=\"right\"><\/iframe>It&#8217;s a key message in my book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0972058702?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=instituteforl-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=0972058702\" target=\"_blank\">Navigating the Winds of Change: Staying on Course in Business &amp; in Life<\/a>: <strong>Perspective matters<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>It&#8217;s so easy to lose perspective<\/strong>. Whether you&#8217;re trying to convince a boss to make a change or trying to evaluate if a government reform idea is a good deal or not, getting a sense of perspective can make all the difference.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Frankly, I have trouble visualizing a trillion of anything<\/strong>. As reported this last week, the White House predicts a deficit of $1.841 trillion dollars for the current fiscal year.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Seems like a really big number<\/strong>. To get some perspective, how does that compare to some previous years? <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/BT-CO-20090812-717882.html\" target=\"_blank\">The biggest deficit for any fiscal year on record is $454.8 billion, rung up in fiscal 2008<\/a>. So we&#8217;re predicting to be $1.4 trillion dollars worse than the worst year on record. Yet as bad as that sounds, I still find it difficult to get my arms around how big a <em>trillion<\/em> really is.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Often a picture can serve up perspective more effectively<\/strong>. Here are a couple examples that illustrate a trillion dollars:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pagetutor.com\/trillion\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\">PageTutor.com<\/a><\/li>\n<li>From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=at3MNu8BRwQ\" target=\"_blank\">YouTube<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This posting is not about whether health care reform or stimulus spending is a good idea or not. It&#8217;s not about left vs. right or Republicans vs. Democrats. <\/p>\n<p><strong>Here&#8217;s my point<\/strong>: when you hear any leader (whether in government or in business) throwing around numbers that are difficult to comprehend, try to get perspective using a picture. It will help you better evaluate the long-term implications of their statements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s a key message in my book Navigating the Winds of Change: Staying on Course in Business &amp; in Life: Perspective matters. It&#8217;s so easy to lose perspective. Whether you&#8217;re trying to convince a boss to make a change or trying to evaluate if a government reform idea is a good deal or not, getting&#8230; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/2009\/08\/trillion-is-the-new-billion\/#more-102\">Continue Reading &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19,53,12,20,63,28],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p488Wj-1E","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leadershipintherealworldblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}