Tips for Weathering the Storm

by Jack Guarnieri, Jersey Jack Pinball & PinballSales.com

It’s around mid-April as I write this, and the last couple of weeks have been an uneasy rollercoaster on the world stage.

With raging wars, financial markets in uncertainty and tariffs on and off and on again, how do you plan for the near and distant future?

Let’s face it, the future is never easy to predict in the best of circumstances. Now, we have events and actions thrown at us that have completely unpredictable consequences.

Do you hire more people or lay them off? Do you buy new equipment or try to sell and get out while you can? What frame of reference or experience do you have to help you predict the course ahead? For the many young people who have never been in a downturn situation, how do they respond to the current market turbulence?

A friend told me to cheer up, it could be worse.

I cheered up. It got worse.

Here are some thoughts that I think can help: Don’t try to do everything alone. Have faith. If we don’t overreact and panic, pretty much everything will be fine. Think first of the important things like your health, family and friends. Breathe. Talk to other people who have weathered the bad times and how they got through them. Have hope. While I say that hope is not a plan, it can help guide you through the worst of times.

Not much is easy today. But, your effort and attitude will make it easier to get through the day. Working and believing that things will get better, and having a positive attitude, will make you stronger and feel better.

Celebrate the small victories you achieve and keep working hard to achieve bigger wins. You are not responsible to fix the whole world. Just work on trying to fix your part of the world. Things will get better, and you will be better for it. Just do the best you can do and be the best person that you can be.

This too shall pass.

Jack Guarnieri started servicing electromechanical pinball machines in 1975 and has been involved in every phase of the amusement game business since then. He was an operator in NYC, then began a distributorship in 1999, PinballSales.com, selling coin-op to the consumer market. In January of 2011, he founded Jersey Jack Pinball (named after his RePlay Magazine pen name), which builds award-winning, full-featured, coin-op pinball machines. Email Jack at [email protected].