The real challenge is getting back up on your own two feet.
(Photo: Erika Marcial/Pixabay | Text: David/ArtisanEnglish.jp)
YouTube / iTunes / Spotify / Radio Public / Pocket Casts / Google Podcasts / Breaker / Overcast
Listen to ArtisanEnglish.jp posts & lesson intros here.
Idiom: Bite the dust
Here we are, nine months into a pandemic few of us saw coming and none of us want to be experiencing.
It’s quite sad, but many businesses that were thriving this time last year have already bit the dust.
They are gone, victims of an unfair natural phenomenon.
Mostly it’s through no fault of their own.
Life hit them with a sucker punch, and they bit the dust.
You see, one meaning of biting the dust is to end in failure.
Even during a non-pandemic year, 20% of new businesses fail within the first two years of operation.
Hold on.
It gets worse.
45% of businesses fail within their first five years, and of the ones that last beyond that, 65% bite the dust during their first ten years.
It’s a hard, cruel world out there, and it’s even more challenging and more brutal for businesses.
Only 25% of companies make it past their tenth anniversary.
So you see, most of the companies that are failing now would have eventually failed anyway.
If it weren’t the pandemic that caused them to go under, it would have been changing trends, increasing rents or an economic downturn.
Only innovative and lucky ones survive.
That’s the way life is.
You may have ridden your bicycle hundreds of times and never fallen off.
Then one day, something happens, and swoosh, thump, there you are on the ground with bloody knees and hands.
We all bite the dust sometimes.
The real challenge is getting back up on your own two feet again.
After this pandemic has passed, we’ll see which companies rise again.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 76.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.