Things are just not that great right now. Perhaps, like me, you feel as if your already-small business is shrinking with the GNP, while the gaps in your safety net (home equity, IRA, etc.) continue to widen with every awful news cycle.

I find myself, lately, ground to stasis by the national misery: depleted of the alternative energy I need to fuel those rainy-day projects that really ought to get done (e.g., address my pathetically incomplete LinkedIn profile); finding funny dog videos more enthralling by the second. At least the geniuses at AIG are alright. Whew.

When business is slow and days … are … slow … motivation is first to go.

It’s the Great Small Business Depression. We’re in it. I’m talking psychological reality, people, not economic reality. But the reality of psychological reality is that we control our own. That means that there is something you can do today to positively affect the state of your small business.

A colleague (and prolific video link source) wrote yesterday:

“I read an article in the May issue of More magazine. I tracked down one of the women in the article through LinkedIn. We exchanged emails, talked on the phone for 45-minutes and are meeting next week for lunch.”

Will anything come of this meeting?

Something already has!

Mary Kay, with one bold action, injected a massive dose of capital into her personal stimulus plan. She wrote New Deal for her business.

There were no funny dog videos in my inbox this morning.

Here’s how she ended:

“Now, it's your turn to do something daring.”

That’s a challenge to all of us, people. What will we dare to attempt today?