September of 2008.

Bailouts didn’t mean a thing to the masses until September 2008. All at once we saw the rapid decline of the stock market. We also started to hear a steady drumbeat of bad economic news that has gotten louder and louder. Every single day there are reports of job losses and layoffs. The unemployment rate is soaring. And everyone is scared.

Or are they?

Take a look at this graph:

This is a graph of the number of visitors to Monster.com from the month of September until now. If you don’t already know, Monster.com is the number two online jobs website on the Internet. Notice how the numbers continually dropped after September? This is not an intuitive conclusion. From the looks of it, while jobless numbers rose jobseekers seem to drop.

The number one jobs search website is Careerbuilder.com. Here’s it’s graph:

Ahh, there we are. While, strangly, the number of visitors drops steadily after September, they start to increase sharply in January. So what happened in January to send folks online looking for jobs in droves? Fear. Or rather, the Politics of Fear.

So, what’s the point anyway? You cannot make decisions by what the news or politicians say. You must decide for yourself whether you will succeed or fail.

Through perseverance many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure. Benjamin Disraeli

So keep working on that software startup. Keep designing. Keep coding. Keep looking up. Look at the guy in the picture above, he’s still walking!