This economic recession period we are witnessing in 2020-2021 during a pandemic has one thing the previous recessions did not have, an orderly phase of marginalization. What we are looking at in 2020 is a phased approach - the first to go was the service-orientated and other low-income jobs at bars, cafes, retailing, field sales, hospitals, entertainment and service. Then we saw manufacturing and supply chain get hit as import/exports has been disrupted as well. But we got one more phase.

The mass layoffs of college-degreed middle working class have been a holdout and there is two good reason for that. It is an election year and those layoffs are on hold until Election Night because corporations don’t want geopolitical fallouts determining the vote outcome.  In addition, the year 2020 is transitioning to digitalization and automation and they not completely done with making human paper-pushing jobs redundant but they almost there.

I have been through the 2001 and 2008 economic downturns and every indication is this 2020 is going to be worst than both of them combined – several leading economists made the same prediction – this is going to be worst than the Great Depression because we got technology advancement, global trade wars and a pandemic all rolled up in this one.

During 2001 and 2008 the one pattern I saw over and over was the pride before the fall, especially in the Black community. In 2001, after those World Trade Towers went down and Enron/Arthur Anderson and WorldCom scandal were exposed, I saw cats around me who were Directors and Vice President lose everything in a matter of months after they been laid off. They lost the interest-only jumbo loan McMansion house, they lost their flimsy side-hustle, dotcom stocks worthless, they lost their spouse and their fancy cars and they quietly moved back upstate to New Jersey or Baltimore where they came from to live with their cousin or aunt.  

2008 was way more devastating. The investment firms and banks were collapsing due to creating speculative financial instruments as a service. Biggest example is they grouped mortgage payments and turned it into an “investment security” called mortgage-backed securities where you invest in steady income from mortgage payments around the world. Many of you saw your mortgage servicer changed 2-3x between 2001 and 2008 as they were selling/flipping your mortgage to the highest bidder. That house of cards fell down really quick and crashed the market.

It is important to understand exactly what happened in 2008 because banks and investment firms were losing billions and the market was collapsing worldwide. It was devastating in the so-called PIGS nations Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain where they end up holding the most bags during the mortgages-back securities flipping. This means there was no credit available to businesses that relied on credit lines to stay in business – worldwide. So mass business closures occurred causing a massive ripple effect of home foreclosures and unemployment and more.

In 2008, a lot of people were completely marginalized. It was so bad I would go to the grocery store or mall and see young people sleeping in their cars with no home, nowhere to go – I would knock on their car windows with food and money. There were people who had resumes and had actually a huge blank period between 2008 and 2014 because they were working at fast food restaurants or cashiers when they used to be Directors, Vice Presidents and business professionals. There were no jobs out there for middle-class management. That’s when it got desperate and people broke into foreclosed homes claiming sovereign doctrines and people lived in tent cities around the country.  It was so bad, I went to a club here in Atlanta with a friend and saw the same stuck-up corporate women at a big company I worked at swinging on the pole with all their goods out.

This 2020 is going to be worst than 2001 and 2008 together. When I refer to 2020, I’m referring to 2020-2029, the entire decade is going to be predicted as “The Lost Decade” where a whole generation will be marginalized, due to stagflation and technology advancement in artificial intelligence as well as global competition. So far this year, I have exes and past dates popping up back in my life hoping I can provide financial support, cats who were bragging about reading 48 Laws of Power are now quietly working Uber or Amazon delivery work. Yeah, they real quiet now, how that reading 48 Laws of Power worked out for them, lol.

We indicated before the corporate layoffs are slated for 4th quarter 2020, expecting to be as soon as October 1st up to Election Night. We going to see a lot of folks who spent their life as part of the group-select find out quickly no one gives a damn about them being a follower and the world does not respect followers – just mop the damn floor while talking to the co-worker about who is the best basketball player.

The group-select are those people who ignore their own personal calling and decided to be a follower like a rodent in a herd colony. They want to be part of a social structure and spend their life seeking validation and acceptance from the colony. Then they discuss among their like-minded members of their colony who is the best, who they admire and the character of those they are followers of. These people want to talk about sports, talk about making money, talk about uplifting their communities but in reality, they just an interest group looking for someone to talk to with similar interests. No one in the world respect these kinds of group-select followers, no one.

In my entire professional life and how I move around this world and sourcing talent, me and others look for only one characteristic/attribute of a person. We look for the self-select; those who took it upon themselves to be at the top of their game from their own convictions. They follow only their own convictions and they do not rely on anybody for charting the path the self-select already envision in their own head. You ask anybody from an elite talent recruitment or seeking business advantage with elite talent on the team and they will tell you the same thing; only the self-select get respect in this world.

No one asked me to go to Tokyo to learn how to apply patterns and practices; I did that shit on my own to find the answers I needed to do for my people. No one sat down and instructed me on the technology and the how-to; I went out and learned that shit on my own to have the technical agility to execute with expertise and proficiency. I’m part of the self-select class of people in this world and when I make moves, the real ones recognize who I am immediately.

With that said, you have to learn to be a self-select as well. I’m not worried about a Recession or being marginalized; I can self-select myself to adapt to however the market demand shape out anywhere in this world and make the move. You have to be the same way and adopt the same mindset. That is how you make it during the recession – you show that you selected yourself to know the latest/greatest technology to create the necessary value to help a firm get out of a recession – that’s the only thing firms looking for when the economy is bad.

Learn the latest technology, practices and patterns and recreate them with your own hands. Select yourself to be the expert of a new language, new market and select yourself to write books, papers and product videos on the subject matter. This is what the world respect at the end of the day, not followers who chose to be part of a group-select. When you become a self-select, then you can talk to cats like me without talking about you follow some dumbass on YouTube – you will be talking about your damn self.

2020 decade is not going to be fun for group-think follower cats, it is going to get real on them fast – it already has for the majority of them. You need to separate yourself from the group-select and become part of the self-select to get noticed and get the opportunities that out there. Select yourself.