Always remember... How you handle obstacles will always be a key factor in determining your ability to achieve success. - Ziad Abdelnour

Central planning inevitably leads to economic chaos and failure.
Friedrich Hayek called the delusion that a single person or a group
of government planners could possibly possess the knowledge to plan
an entire economy a “fatal conceit.” The overwhelming historical
evidence is that the more freedom a nation has, the more economic
opportunities will exist and the more dynamic that nation’s economy
will be. Likewise, the more regulations, controls, taxes, governmentrun
industries, protectionism, and other forms of interventionism that
exists, the poorer the country will become.

I remain fundamentally optimistic about
Wall Street as a marketplace and as a vehicle for wealth creation. Its
future will rightly depend on several variables, chief among them
being human choices; whether they be rationally, emotionally, subjectively
or objectively made. Financial engineering taught us that if
it could be quantified, it could be qualified. We learned about how
to use leverage and have abused that knowledge for a myriad of
reasons. We became practitioners of the transaction-based model, but forgot that long before the abacus there was trust and integrity,
anchors of relationship-based models common with Middle East and
Asian markets. It goes back to a handshake, the first and enduring
example of mutual consensus.

If you make a mistake, don’t spend precious time and energy trying to deny it or point the finger at someone else. Be a leader and own it, then spend your time and energy fixing the problem. As I’ve already noted, start-ups often fail because founders want to be seen as the smartest person in the room, which means not being wrong. Making a mistake is going to happen. None of us is perfect. But the difference between success and failure is how you handle that mistake