Good things are just simple things.

It was a cold morning today, and I left home at 7am for a speaker event:

Topic: The Credit Crisis: Its Roots and Aftermath
Speaker: Tom Russo, Former Vice Chairman and Chief Legal Officer of Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc

Not a very good timing to listen to a talk about Financial crisis in the very early morning. But wonder if there's any good time in a day for financial crisis ?!?

I did not regret waking up early for this event though. Very aspirational to hear from Tom, who was personally in the center of the crisis when it happened. Losing $150 mill overnight was not an easy challenge for him to overcome...

Here are personal sharings from Tom that I took away from the session:

1. There are nothing more important than Health, Family and Friends. Without those 3 things, nothing else seems to matter too much... He continued saying, he would rather lose everything than to know if he had a cancer, or if his kid ever got into car accident.
---> It's simple, but its the most powerful truth that people tend to forget when they face a big crisis in life. Good things are just simple things.

2. Crisis makes you verify who you truly are, and what matters most to you.

3. Treat triumph and disaster equally.

It may be weird to come back from a session about financial crisis, and the key takeaways from it are these touchy-feely intangible things. So here it comes a few tangible hard data that he mentioned regarding what happened to the financial crisis.

He concluded the root causes of this crisis were a combination of the low interest rates (lower than necessary) AND the leverage. The country (i.e. US) has been living beyond it means with a too big debt. Some hard data: total national debt in the society (including consumer, corporate debts as well as medicare expenses etc) is around $ 112 trillion dollars (yes, you read it right - its TRILLION dollars), while total national fund is nowhere close to be able to pay off these debts. In other words, defaults are the unavoidable thing to start happening, which led to the whole systemic risks in major investment banks like Lehman Brothers. The financial crisis followed...

In all, not so many provoking thoughts about the financial crisis itself, but I find his personal sharing of how he went through this crisis was a valuable story. It's more than WORTH my early cold morning :).