Crisis Creates Opportunity Quotes

A crisis creates the opportunity to dip deep into the reservoirs of our very being, to rise to levels of confidence, strength, and resolve that otherwise we didn't think we possessed.

Every crisis offers an opportunity to grow stronger and wiser; to reach deep within and discover a better you that will create a better outcome.

The challenges we face in life are not meant to be some sort of punishment; rather, they are an invitation to change — and an opportunity to create something even better than before.

Schools themselves aren't creating the opportunity gap: the gap is already large by the time children enter kindergarten and does not grow as children progress through school. The gaps in cognitive achievement by level of maternal education that we observe at age 18-powerful predictors of who goes to college and who does not - are mostly present at age 6when children enter school. Schooling plays only a minor role in alleviating or creating test score gaps.

In the past decade, we have transitioned from an innovation economy to an exploitation economy. Innovation is dangerous and unpredictable. It changes market dynamics and creates opportunities for nimble new players to steal share from established players.

We’re clearly heading into a period of prolonged emergency, although the crisis will vary between chronic and acute over time. That increases the prospects for revolutionary—or rather, devolutionary—struggle, especially if radical organizations are able to anticipate and effectively seize opportunities offered by particular crises. It’s unlikely that mass support will be rallied for anticivilizational causes in the foreseeable future, because most people are happy to get the material benefits of this culture and ignore the consequences. However, an increase in political discontent can be beneficial even if it doesn’t create a majority.

Anchor Your Stories in Redemptive Themes So We Are Moved to Live Up to Them: Rather than making yourself the victim or the hero in the stories you tell, describe a daunting time of loss, crisis, or criticism or where you made a mistake or acted badly, yet you were eventually able to learn from it. Such stories show vulnerability and a desire to grow and live fully rather than in fear. Then that facet of you can be the place where others can positively and productively connect with you, hard-earned strengths firmly attached together. You can support each other in reinforcing redemptive characterizations and action.

So George talked about the two aspects of every crisis: danger and opportunity. If you have the right mind-set, he said, you can make the crisis work for you. You have the chance to create a new identity for the team that will be even stronger than before.

To avert climate crisis, it's important that humanity embraces permaculture economics, prioritizing regeneration over exploitation. Interestingly enough, putting regeneration over exploitation will create more opportunities for individuals and businesses to profit.

Every crisis, actual or impending, needs to be viewed as an opportunity to bring about profound changes in our society. Going beyond protest organizing, visionary organizing begins by creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing system.

Persuading people they have more power than they do and ignoring the very real social barriers to attainment primes them for self-blame when reality fails to deliver. The worst extremes of phoney empowerment, argues Frayne, can be found in the trite aphorisms of the self-help industry, where popular psychologists ascribe to us almost magical abilities to alter circumstances despite the harsh realities constraining us. In a world where problems like disadvantage, unemployment and work-related distress are so socially embedded, downplaying the very real obstacles to opportunity is regularly experienced as yet another form of punishment, yet another form of blaming and shaming the individual.

... I draw on the work of Piaget (1968) in identifying conflict as the harbinger of growth and also on the work of Erikson (1964) who, in charting development through crisis, demonstrates how a heightened vulnerability signals the emergence of a potential strength, creating a dangerous opportunity for growth, "a turning point for better or worse" (p. 139).

Shame creates lies about how men should think and act, and when men don't fulfill those roles, they have additional shame. We see it play out in one of the greatest and most-ignored crises of our times: homelessness. We largely see it as an economic problem, because it is. It's a result of a lack of economic mobility and opportunity as well as a housing crisis, but it's also enabled by the lies we tell about men.

Contemporary discussion of inequality in America often conflates two related but distinct issues: • Equality of income and wealth. The distribution of income and wealth among adults in today’s America—framed by the Occupy movement as the 1 percent versus the 99 percent—has generated much partisan debate during the past several years. Historically, however, most Americans have not been greatly worried about that sort of inequality: we tend not to begrudge others their success or care how high the socioeconomic ladder is, assuming that everyone has an equal chance to climb it, given equal merit and energy. • Equality of opportunity and social mobility. The prospects for the next generation—that is, whether young people from different backgrounds are, in fact, getting onto the ladder at about the same place and, given equal merit and energy, are equally likely to scale it—pose an altogether more momentous problem in our national culture. Beginning with the “all men are created equal” premise of our national independence, Americans of all parties have historically been very concerned about this issue.

How are we going to bring about these transformations? Politics as usual—debate and argument, even voting—are no longer sufficient. Our system of representative democracy, created by a great revolution, must now itself become the target of revolutionary change. For too many years counting, vast numbers of people stopped going to the polls, either because they did not care what happened to the country or the world or because they did not believe that voting would make a difference on the profound and interconnected issues that really matter. Now, with a surge of new political interest having give rise to the Obama presidency, we need to inject new meaning into the concept of the “will of the people.” The will of too many Americans has been to pursue private happiness and take as little responsibility as possible for governing our country. As a result, we have left the job of governing to our elected representatives, even though we know that they serve corporate interests and therefore make decisions that threaten our biosphere and widen the gulf between the rich and poor both in our country and throughout the world. In other words, even though it is readily apparent that our lifestyle choices and the decisions of our representatives are increasing social injustice and endangering our planet, too many of us have wanted to continue going our merry and not-so-merry ways, periodically voting politicians in and out of office but leaving the responsibility for policy decisions to them. Our will has been to act like consumers, not like responsible citizens. Historians may one day look back at the 2000 election, marked by the Supreme Court’s decision to award the presidency to George W. Bush, as a decisive turning point in the death of representative democracy in the United States. National Public Radio analyst Daniel Schorr called it “a junta.” Jack Lessenberry, columnist for the MetroTimes in Detroit, called it “a right-wing judicial coup.” Although more restrained, the language of dissenting justices Breyer, Ginsberg, Souter, and Stevens was equally clear. They said that there was no legal or moral justification for deciding the presidency in this way.3 That’s why Al Gore didn’t speak for me in his concession speech. You don’t just “strongly disagree” with a right-wing coup or a junta. You expose it as illegal, immoral, and illegitimate, and you start building a movement to challenge and change the system that created it. The crisis brought on by the fraud of 2000 and aggravated by the Bush administration’s constant and callous disregard for the Constitution exposed so many defects that we now have an unprecedented opportunity not only to improve voting procedures but to turn U.S. democracy into “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” instead of government of, by, and for corporate power.

International economic integration generally expands economic opportunities and is good for society. The great alternatives to economic integration failed. Attempts to seal countries off from the rest of the world economy in the 1930s were ultimately disastrous. Germany, Italy, and Japan closed their economies and also turned toward dictatorship, war, and conquest. The poor countries and former colonies that created closed economies in the 1930s and 1940s collapsed into economic stagnation, social unrest, crisis, and military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s. Few countries have achieved economic progress without access to the international economy. But an insistence on globalization at all cost is equally misguided. During the golden age of global capitalism before 1914, governments committed themselves to international economic integration and little else. Supporters of free trade, the gold standard, and international finance wanted governments to limit themselves to safeguarding these policies and their properties. But these governments ignored the concerns of many harmed by globalization. As the working and middle classes grew, so did their demands for social reforms to improve the lot of the unemployed, the poor, children, and the elderly. The clash between classical orthodoxy and these new social movements turned into bitter, often violent, conflicts, especially once the Depression hit. Attempts to maintain global capitalism without addressing those ill treated by world markets drove societies toward polarization and conflict.

God has not given us the spirit of fear. He has given us the spirit of Love and a competent mind. Love conquers fear, because Love has Power, that creates a competent mind, that allows a person to make rational decisions and use righteous judgment to resolve or solve problems. Through this God-given process, we are able to endure and persevere in times of hardships, and when facing a crisis. When our spirit is broken by hate, and heavy loads are placed upon us, we turn to God for strength in our storms of life. And we seek his Love to restore us to wholeness. He restores us with Hope. From within him we receive Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance as it is noted in Galatians 5:22. Because of God's Love for us, we are able to have the patience to wait for his Power to restore us so that we are in control of our mind to over-power fear and to lead a successful life to meet our goals and create a greater opportunity filled with his blessings. He has created us to be a victorious people. Therefore, we are able to create far greater opportunities through Love. God gives power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increases strength. (Isaiah 40:29) When we are broken by the storms of life, God's Love restore us. We bow before him, in a humble spirit at his throne of grace, and ask in prayer for mercy and renewed strength. It is here that we find the needed strength to forgive those who have wronged us and the Power to Love. Those who wait upon the Lord, shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:31) Fear is powerless. It torments the mind and paralyzes the thought process. It causes panic. Thereby, leaving the person, feeling a sense of hopelessness and unwilling to trust others. It closes possibilities to allow for change. The prophet Isaiah noted; Even the youth shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. (Isaiah 40:30) And when Jesus disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, "It is a spirit," and they cried out for fear. But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I, be not afraid. (Matthew 14:26, 27) Fear is a person's worst enemy; it causes panic, that results in making irrational decisions. Such behavior is based on poor judgment, that was made due to a lack of patience, to make an adequate investigation of the situation before proceeding. The outcome will create serious problems that can cause serious harm. LOVE is the chain that binds us together. Do not allow hate to separate us. There is One God One family One faith One world We are not defined by belief or by faith nor religion. We are the family of God. Written by: Ellen J. Barrier Source of Scriptures: King James Version Bible

The world has been through many crises over the millennia, but this is the first global crisis that has been created by humanity. Whether we take responsibility for our predicament will determine our future and the future of the world. There is an ancient teaching that in times of imminent catastrophe we are given the opportunity of divine intercession; we can look towards God and pray for divine help. We are at such a moment and the soul of the world is crying out. Are we prepared to welcome back the divine and work together with the forces of creation?

Creativity can flourish in times of crisis, and the absence of specific instruments, circumstances can become a motivator to create. Shifting attention from “I don’t have this, that’s why I can’t do that” to “I want this, and how can I get that?” liberates intrinsic resources that help to be proactive and see opportunities rather than obstacles. Creativity is the result of giving birth to something new, and it’s challenging but the result is gratifying.

Creating opportunities for self-reliance is not in itself a long-term solution for refugees, but it is an important step towards all of the main long-term solutions: repatriation, local integration, or resettlement. This is because offering people autonomy and economic opportunity is likely to empower them to better contribute to whichever society into which they are ultimately assimilated. It can make refugees' eventual return more sustainable because they will return with the skills and motivation to rebuild their country of origin. It can make people better equipped to contribute to a new society once resettled. And it can make them a more desirable resettlement prospect because of their ability to find work and live autonomously.

To each of you here today I say, as we create plans for the future of this organization, we need to think big. Significant opportunity awaits us, and we need to be ready. I want this organization to be able to handle anything the impending climate crisis might throw at us.

Israeli caution toward Russia in 2022 was unsurprising because Israeli surveillance firm Cellebrite had sold Vladimir Putin phone-hacking technology that he used on dissidents and political opponents for years, deploying it tens of thousands of times. Israel didn’t sell the powerful NSO Group phone-hacking tool, Pegasus, to Ukraine despite the country having asked for it since 2019: it did not want to anger Moscow. Israel was thus complicit in Russia’s descent into autocracy. Within days of the Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, the global share prices of defense contractors soared, including Israel’s biggest, Elbit Systems, whose stock climbed 70 percent higher than the year before. One of the most highly sought-after Israeli weapons is a missile interception system. US financial analysts from Citi argued that investment in weapons manufacturers was the ethical thing to do because “defending the values of liberal democracies and creating a deterrent … preserves peace and global stability.”19 Israeli cyber firms were in huge demand. Israel’s Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked said that Israel would benefit financially because European nations wanted Israeli armaments.20 She said the quiet part out loud, unashamed of seeing opportunity in a moment of crisis. “We have unprecedented opportunities, and the potential is crazy,” an Israeli defense industry source told Haaretz.21

We live, as did Israel, in a cycle of creation and crisis. God creates through the power of His word, and we are presented with a choice to either obey or disobey. The word that God spoke at Creation is the same word as the word that God spoke through Jeremiah. When God physically created the heavens and the earth, He did so under hostile conditions of chaos and darkness. These hostile conditions have a moral and spiritual correlation in the life of ancient Israel. God uses His word, through Jeremiah, to “create” a new nation under hostile moral and spiritual conditions. God also takes us back to basics in a time of crisis, presenting us with a choice to serve Him that represents our opportunity to bring the crisis to an end. We can do so if we choose to serve Him rather than persist in the way of deception and disobedience.

up. Young women now assume they will have long careers, egalitarian marriages, and children. But while some things have changed, others have stayed the same, and corporate America simply has not caught up with the times. Not only has there been little movement to create new work structures that fit more easily with family responsibilities, but most major companies offer true equal opportunity only to women who are single-minded workaholics.

Our concern,” Jimmy wrote in the DU brochure, is with how our city has been disintegrating socially, economically, politically, morally and ethically. We are convinced that we cannot depend upon one industry or any large corporation to provide us with jobs. It is now up to us—the citizens of Detroit—to put our hearts, our imaginations, our minds, and our hands together to create a vision and project concrete programs for developing the kinds of local enterprises that will provide meaningful jobs and income for all citizens. To engage Detroiters in the creation of this vision, DU embarked on a campaign for open government in the city, issuing a series of leaflets calling on citizens to examine the whole chain of developer-driven megaprojects with which Young had tried and failed to revive the city (including Poletown and the People Mover) and to assume responsibility for envisioning and implementing alternative roads of development based on restoring neighborhoods and communities. During the debate over casino gambling Young had challenged his opponents to come up with an alternative, accusing us of being naysayers without any solutions of our own. Jimmy welcomed the challenge. There was nothing he liked better than using crisis and breakdown as an opportunity for renewal and transformation. His forte was devising solutions that were visionary and at the same time so down-to-earth that people could almost taste them. For more than fifteen years he had been writing and talking about the crisis developing in our cities and the need to redefine work, especially for the sake of our young people. In October 1986, at a meeting in Oakland, California, which the Bay Area NOAR sponsored to present “a vision of 21st century neighborhoods and communities,” Jimmy had declared that it was now “idealistic” to expect the government or corporations to do the work that is needed to keep up our communities and to provide for our elementary safety and security. Multinational corporations and rapid technological development have turned our cities into graveyards. “Efficiency in production,” he argued, “can no longer be our guiding principle because it comes at the price of eliminating human creativity and skills and making millions of people expendable.” He continued: “The residue of the last 100 years of rapid technological development is alienation, hopelessness, self-hate and hate for one another, and the violence which has created a reign of terror in our inner cities.

Krisis, the ancient Greek word from which the modern term is derived, doesn’t mean something terrible. It means a ‘turning point,’ a moment for a major decision. Across the other side of the planet, the Chinese developed a word for ‘crisis’ that also brings with it a sense of change. Their word contains two characters: One means ‘emergency’ and the other ‘opportunity.’ Within every crisis there is something dangerous, which we can, and must, pay attention to. Yet, after we have dealt with the most pressing issues, we get access to an opportunity too. We can use any crisis as a turning point to find more peace, purpose, and power inside us. Some wisdom traditions, such as the Eleusinian Mysteries in Ancient Greece, even created artificial crises for their adepts to ensure they got their money’s worth. Few people want to engage in a transformational experience and not come out with a change in attitude or a shift in consciousness! A good crisis is the gateway to this. It serves as the incentive to switch on. The great psychologist Carl Jung believed that even psychotic crises could be deciphered as turning points for transformation and change. So every crisis is asking you: Which way will you turn? Toward the future or the past? Up onto the Breakthrough Curve or back into your comfort zone

We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies. Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

Societies in acute distress often form what anthropologists call “crisis cults,” which promise recovered grandeur and empowerment during times of collapse, anxiety, and disempowerment. A mythologized past will magically return. America will be great again. The old social hierarchies, opportunities, and rules will be resurrected. Prescribed rituals and behaviors, including acts of violence to cleanse the society of evil, will vanquish the malevolent forces that are blamed for the crisis. These crisis cults—they have arisen in most societies that faced destruction, from Easter Island to Native Americans at the time of the 1890 Ghost Dance—create hermetically sealed tribes informed by magical thinking. We are already far down this road. Our ruling elites are little more than Ice Age hunters in Brooks Brothers suits, as the anthropologist Ronald Wright told me, driving herds of woolly mammoths over cliffs to keep the party going without asking what will happen when the food source suddenly goes extinct. “The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge,” the philosopher John Gray wrote. “The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge—not even in the long run.

To recap, here’s what we all can do to stop the mass shooting epidemic: As Individuals: Trauma: Build relationships and mentor young people Crisis: Develop strong skills in crisis intervention and suicide prevention Social proof: Monitor our own media consumption Opportunity: Safe storage of firearms; if you see or hear something, say something. As Institutions: Trauma: Create warm environments; trauma-informed practices; universal trauma screening Crisis: Build care teams and referral processes; train staff Social proof: Teach media literacy; limit active shooter drills for children Opportunity: Situational crime prevention; anonymous reporting systems As a Society: Trauma: Teach social emotional learning in schools. Build a strong social safety net with adequate jobs, childcare, maternity leave, health insurance, and access to higher education Crisis: Reduce stigma and increase knowledge of mental health; open access to high quality mental health treatment; fund counselors in schools Social proof: No Notoriety protocol; hold media and social media companies accountable for their content Opportunity: Universal background checks, red flag laws, permit-to-purchase, magazine limits, wait periods, assault rifle ban

Undeniably, economic factors can and often do exacerbate antisemitism, and often create crises in which antisemites may flourish. After all, such factors impinge on virtually all aspects of society, and when an economic crisis occurs, the resultant social upheaval may unleash many of the worst aspects of a society, among them Jew-hatred. But economic factors do not cause Jew-hatred; they only provide opportunities for it to be expressed. For one thing, there is little if any correlation between Jews’ wealth and antisemitism. Jews have often suffered the worst antisemitism when they were poor, as was true of the overwhelming majority of Jews in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Poland and Russia, and have encountered the least amount of antisemitism when affluent, as in the United States and Canada today. As regards attributing medieval antisemitism to the Jews’ role as moneylenders, this puts the cart before the horse. Because of Christian European antisemitism during the Middle Ages, Jews were often denied the right to practice professions other than moneylending. Jews were not hated because they lent money; they lent money because they were hated. Obviously, once Jews became moneylenders, Jew-hatred was exacerbated.

They will tell you that we are traitors to our nation by encouraging people to use bitcoin. They will tell you that we are criminals, thugs, drug dealers, and terrorists. Don’t believe me? Look up what the Indian government has said just in the last two weeks about people who trade gold on the black market: "terrorists," "criminals," "thugs." ​ I’m just a coder, I’m just a talker; I’m not a terrorist, I’m not a thug. But if I have the opportunity to build an exit from this system, then I will take that opportunity—because I know who the real terrorists are. There is no greater form of terrorism than creating war against your own people, by deliberately disrupting the very lifeblood of an economy, when there is no crisis; creating a natural disaster of enormous proportions simply to fight a currency war against another country.

Every crisis offers an opportunity to grow stronger and wiser; to reach deep within and discover a better you that will create a better outcome. So while this is your crisis, what matters most is what you do with it.

It took the last 10 years to create 20 million jobs and 10 weeks to destroy 40 million.

The Monsanto Company views the global water crisis as a multibillion-dollar business opportunity. We see big problems—it sees big money. Monsanto’s Robert Farley admits, “Population growth and economic development will apply increasing pressure on the natural resource markets. . . . These are the markets that are most relevant to us as a life sciences company . . . in which there are predictable sustainability challenges and therefore opportunities to create business value.” 8 Monsanto foresees profits of sixty-three million dollars by 2008 for water ventures in India and Mexico, and other companies are riding the dusty bandwagon to the tune of more than three hundred million a year in these two countries alone. 9

Women under 30 who don’t have children have closed the pay gap with their male counterparts. Once women have kids, they go to 77 cents on the dollar relative to their male counterparts. Part of our ability to create the same career trajectory for women with kids is to create more options and flexibility around where they work from. Part of working from home is the ability to work at different hours than the rest of your team, allowing for family needs like caretaking, side gigs, or hobbies that contribute to a work-life balance. It may be time to unroll the yoga mat or dust off the drum set in the garage, instead of spending 225 hours, or 9 full days, a year commuting.

With 8 million advertisers, and a model that creates immediate opportunity for others when one reduces spend, Facebook possesses the most robust (self-healing, even) customer base in the history of business.

with 5% of the world’s population the U.S. has endured 25% of the infections and deaths. It took the last 10 years to create 20 million jobs and 10 weeks to destroy 40 million. Travel is down, restaurants are dark, drinking and handgun sales are up. Over 2 million Gen Zers have moved back in with their parents,4 and 75 million young people are going to school amidst uncertainty, conflict, and danger.