Reboot (eBook)

Your COVID-19 Quick-Start Guide to Life, Work, and Hope

MK Kim (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
262 Seiten
Lioncrest Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5445-2135-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Author MK Kim was one of Korea's most sought-after motivational speakers. For more than twenty-eight years, she was a corporate speaker, as well as a television and YouTube personality, speaking on the subjects of human relationships, communication, and personal growth. Then, in January of 2020, her career came to a screeching halt. The coronavirus and social distancing shut down every major speaking venue around the world. Determined to find a new way to do the work she so dearly loved, MK Kim set out on a virtual quest. She interviewed dozens of experts, read hundreds of books, pored over thousands of pages of reports, and listened to the stories of countless people whose lives and jobs had been impacted by COVID-19. In doing so, she discovered a four-part formula that was working, time and again, to help people adapt to a post-coronavirus world. Reboot: Your COVID-19 Quick-Start Guide to Life, Work, and Hope, lays out this proven formula, step by step, to help you reboot your own life and learn to thrive again.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

1. Can We Ever Go Back to the “Before-Corona” Times?

It Was Not Temporary; It Was the Beginning

“When will this be over?”

In the beginning, each person I met skipped the usual greeting and asked this question instead.

“Who knows? I thought it’d calm down in a month or two, but here we are.”

The responses were mostly the same. No one had a clear answer.

Next came the stage where everybody consoled each other.

“It’s tough, isn’t it? It’s all because of this damn virus.”

“Everyone’s having a hard time these days. Just hang on. Hopefully, it’ll be better soon.”

At the time, we still had hope. I guess we could still afford to take it a little easy. But now, months later, I hardly find anybody having the same conversation. Everybody is experiencing panic in their own way, to varying degrees.

“This is going to ruin everything. Self-employed small businesses are closing, and larger companies are marching toward bankruptcy. You think it is about to get under control, but one new case appears, and everything is paralyzed again. I’m afraid this is going to last until next year.”

We’re feeling instinctively that some tremendous change is on its way. But we only get a glimpse of a dim silhouette, and the effects of coronavirus are so unpredictable that nobody can say definitively what will be next. Yet, there is a question that refuses to leave our minds: “Someday we’ll go back to the days before corona, won’t we?”

I met an old friend of mine a while ago—a veteran businesswoman with extensive experience in corporate events. She has such an extraordinary passion and ability that she grew her company to fifty employees just two years after starting the business. Despite considerable authority and breadth of experience, her business collapsed irreparably when the coronavirus hit.

“Honestly, I thought everything would be fine if I endured for a month or two. But it continued to get worse. My business is about bringing a large audience to a location for an event. I’ve weathered natural disasters and freak situations, but nothing like this. Last week, a few employees came to me and told me that they were leaving because the company was having a difficult time. They asked me to bring them back when everything returned to normal…I was determined to hang on no matter what, but now I have lost all hope. I just choke up several times a day.”

I also met a college buddy a few weeks ago. As a fifty-seven-year-old professor, he is only about eight years from retirement. He said that he’s actually busier than before, trying to adjust to the online-class system now that colleges have stopped giving in-person classes.

“I predicted that the world would come to this point eventually, but I’m flustered because it came so abruptly. Professors are scrambling to deliver online classes. At first, I thought things would get back to normal, but this is unnerving. I’m afraid that I might have to continue online classes until the end of the year. I don’t see any point in starting offline classes either, because once we have a single confirmed case in the class, we’ll be right back to online classes anyway. Everybody is in a panic right now—professors, the college, and students—because we don’t know how to teach and learn or in what environment.”

Everybody was intimidated by the coronavirus, even the talented, passionate businesswoman and the university professor with outstanding analytical skills. Everyone struggled to get through each day, and I was not an exception. I simply couldn’t keep feeling this confusion.

With a sense of urgency, fearing that we might never go back to the old life again, I started studying. The balance of my bank account was quickly draining, making me toss and turn, sleepless until dawn. I was desperate beyond words. I was facing a matter of survival, for both my family and company. For several months, I’ve read thousands of pages of reports, met experts from all walks of life, and read page after page in newspapers, searching for clues to understand this new world. And then I arrived at a clear conclusion: This isn’t coming to an end. The world as we knew it is over. We are already living in the new normal.

Coronavirus Will Never Come to an End

COVID-19 is marked by its powerful contagiousness. Unlike SARS or MERS, which had a low mortality rate, COVID-19 is so highly contagious that a single person can infect hundreds of people at a single large gathering. This infectious power caused our society to disintegrate instantly. Social distancing was the best response that we found to the mad spread of the coronavirus.

However, after a few months of social distancing, life didn’t seem like a life anymore. I questioned whether this would ever stop. Even if we were to develop a vaccine, it was hard to believe that it would solve all our problems. As questions kept mounting in my mind, I met Choi Jae-cheon, a chair professor at Ewha Womans University. I thought that if anybody could give me clear answers on the nature of the coronavirus and what the future might be, he was the one.

When I asked him if we were ever going back to our previous routines, he told me, “The spread of coronavirus might slow down, but it will never come to a complete stop. People wish to hear that it has ended, but how can a virus end completely?”

“Do you mean that we have to keep living like this?” I asked.

“If humans continue to destroy the ecosystem to the point where we change the climate as we do now, a variety of other creatures besides bats will carry some type of deadly virus and strike us every two to three years. I mean, viruses will strike us at a speed faster than humans can develop vaccines for them.”

“Then what do you suggest we should do?” I blurted the question out of desperation.

“I call social distancing a ‘behavioral vaccine.’ The only vaccine available for us at the moment is this behavioral vaccine. Going forward, we may have to learn how to coexist with viruses in the form of social distancing.”

Prof. Choi’s advice was sincere and born of having dedicated his entire life to the calling of being an ecologist. After leaving his office, one word lingered in my mind: coexistence. My illusion that the current situation is only “temporary” was also slowly disintegrating.

The Coronavirus-Induced Massive Tipping Point

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, equates the spread of the virus to the concept of a “social epidemic.” According to him, all social epidemics have a tipping point: a moment where they break loose.1 The concept of the tipping point can also be applied to marketing, and it is a marketer’s job to proactively promote and sell a product or service until it becomes a trend, or reaches a tipping point, and makes many people purchase the product or the service. This time, however, all industries have reached a tipping point without having to spend money on marketing. In other words, coronavirus has played the role of a “global marketer” for them.

In April, The Wall Street Journal reported, “Adoption of robots and drones carrying goods speeds up as a frightened world craves safe delivery of everything from medical supplies to food.”2 The four-legged robot dog Spot approaches a patient and starts live broadcasting so that the patient can talk to a medical team remotely. A drone delivers the patient’s vital signs to the medical staff. This is what’s happening in the medical field while the coronavirus is rampaging.

The advances that the coronavirus accelerated affect every aspect of our society. Interpersonal relationships are shifting to online and robots are routine in medical services. Education takes place not in the classroom but on an online platform, and the workplace is moving from office to home. With every sector in our society having reached a tipping point of its own, we are standing on the cusp of an era of new standards, also known as the new normal.

The title of the 1972 paper “More Is Different,” written by Nobel Prize winner Philip Anderson, points to exactly this phenomenon.3 It is small changes, not a single big one, that accumulate to create a world that is qualitatively different. The world is becoming different as more individuals are intent on avoiding risks and crave safety. To be exact, it’s not that the world is becoming different: it is us, individuals, who are creating a different world.

It’s heartbreaking, but we must acknowledge the reality. Now is the time to take a deep breath and ask, “How should I prepare for the future?” We must find clues for how to change, little by little, every day. We must look for different ways in which to enjoy the daily routines of eating, living, learning, and sharing. We must find solutions on our own, with a...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 29.6.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-10: 1-5445-2135-9 / 1544521359
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5445-2135-0 / 9781544521350