Steve the Owl's Blog

A gold medal is a wonderful thing, but if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.- Irving Blitzer, played by John Candy in Cool Runnings (1993)

Hi, everyone. This weekend, I was checking the listings on TV, and I saw that one of the local channels was rerunning Cool Runnings, the 1993 movie based somewhat loosely on the 1988 Jamaican bobsled team, the Caribbean country’s first entry in the Winter Olympics, this one in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. While it is true that some of the events are fictionalized (such as the tension between the Jamaicans and the other countries in the competition, having Olympic-caliber sprinters rather than members of the army track team, and the role of the coach as a single individual rather than a team), there is a lot that this movie can teach about determination and what it means to truly compete with honor.

Training for Winter without Snow?

One thing that the movie did get right is the fact that before they began to prepare for the Olympic bobsled, none of the members of the team had ever seen snow before, and they were getting ready to ride at 70 or 80 mph down a hill in a sport where, “Bones don’t break, they shatter.” (I’ve heard of luge participants who say that the real question of the sport isn’t if your bones will be broken, but how many will be broken.) Needless to say, it is very difficult to find people who are willing to go through this when they were in a warm climate. The movie solves this problem for the purposes of the story by having one of the future bobsledders trip and fall during the finals of the 100-meter Olympic trials and taking out two other runners, including the team captain and driver, the son of an Olympic gold medalist. In the movie, the lead character, Derice Bannick, refuses to give up on his Olympic dream, and knowing that four years is an eternity for a sprinter, he decides to focus his efforts on the Winter Olympics instead, and he seeks out his father’s friend, Irv Blitzer, who was disqualified from the 1972 Olympics and wants to get away from the sport.

In the movie, the four finally come together, battling the elements, each other (one of the bobsledders has not yet forgiven the one who tripped him), and the doubters, to finally qualify for the Olympics. Along the way, there are three very important lessons learned. One of the bobsledders, named Yul Brenner (remember, this is a fictionalized account; the character probably got his name from the shaved head of the actor as a reference and tribute to the actor) decries the attitude of people who seem content for a life of poverty where they are “going nowhere and you’re thrilled to death about it.” He then takes out a picture and says that this is where he wants to live, revealing a picture of Buckingham Palace. Here is the scene, which is one that moves me:

Another comes in the form of the actual races. At first, Derice sees the Swiss team, ranked #1 in the world, and decides to emulate them. However, this does not work for the team, and they struggle in the first run down the hill in the competition. For the next one, they decide to be livelier and find their own style. The result is that they become contenders in the race.

The most important lesson, and the one at the heart of the movie, is about what it truly means to be a great person. Even though the character is fictitious, in the movie, John Candy (in one of his final roles before dying of a heart attack at the age of 43) plays a down-and-out two-time gold medalist who decides to add excessive weight to his sled in an effort to get an edge over the competition. He was discovered and had to give up his gold medals. His young protege dreams of Olympic glory, but Blitzer had the hard-earned life lesson at the bottom of the quote at the top of this entry. The instant that you only start to think about winning, you lose all perspective in life. I have seen this with people in network marketing who get so obsessed with getting that close or getting that sale that all of their friends stop coming around for fear that they will be pitched. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t want success, but I am saying that if you end up alienating everyone along the way to trying to earn a fortune, you’ll probably end up with neither friends nor money.

To me, that is the heart of the movie. It is about the desire not only to be the best, but to be the best person as well, and the pride that comes with earning a place at the top of your field, no matter how you finish when you get there.

In what ways do you seek to become a better person, even when the rest of the world thinks you are crazy?

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It’s not that I disagree with affirmations, but I believe that whatever you affirm must be the truth. If you’re broke, affirm “I’m broke!” If you want more, say, “I’m 40 and broke!” Jim Rohn

Hi, everyone. I hope that you are getting ready to enjoy a great weekend and you look back on this September as one of accomplishment. Lately, I’ve noticed that The Money Class by Suze Orman has been re-airing a lot on the local PBS stations here, and I’ve watched a few episodes of her eponymous weekend show on CNBC. There are a lot of financial experts out there who want to tell you a lot of different things, but I would say that she and David Bach are definitely my favorites.

Both present their information in a way that is easy to understand, and it helps you to become more savvy about the investing world, to the point where I’ve even tried a couple of stock-picking contests. (I used the same principles and picked similar stocks for each. I’m doing very well in one [gaining nearly 2% in the month since I started while the market has been largely flat], and not as well in another, but I am excited about learning about discipline and patience necessary to be a great investor.) It is with this in mind that I come over and over to Suze Orman’s famous catchphrase, “Stand in your truth.”

What It Means

Stand in your truth basically means that you must be completely honest about your financial situation if you want to see success. If you are broke, that is your truth; if you are in debt, that is your truth; if you are spending too much, that is your truth; if everything is going wonderfully for you, that is your truth.

What I think is so powerful about this phrase is that it opens up everything else for you. If you are spending $4000 a month, but you’re only bringing home paychecks that say $3000 a month, the key is to stop digging wherever possible. If you can’t quite get your financial situation in order with cutting spending, this means earning more money, whether by increasing your abilities as an employee to set yourself up for a promotion and a raise because you are indispensable to the company, or through increasing the profits in your business.

“Standing in your truth” leads to another simple fact. Living above your means is bad, but living within your means doesn’t help, either. Why is that? As Suze Orman, David Bach, Jim Rohn, George Clason, and a host of others have noted, living within your means leads to insecurity. Once we learn to live below our means, we can start to build for our future. I’ve seen formulas that recommend living off of anywhere from 50-70% of income, and using the rest of that money to build your future, donate to charity, and pay off debt, or any combination thereof.

What It Does

One of the things that standing in your truth does is give you peace of mind. While I am currently in a situation where long-term employment meant a pretty big hole to climb out of, knowing that I am able to climb out, even if it isn’t necessarily as fast as I would like, tells me that I am doing something right. Back before the long-term unemployment set in, I was saving 10% of every paycheck and 50% of my tax refund check. I didn’t know about investment at the time, so I used it as a rainy day fund. There were a couple of times I had to withdraw from it over the course of just under twenty months, namely to pay for things when I knew a lump-sum payment was coming but I didn’t have the money yet. Rather than treating it as money gone from my account, I treated it as a loan to myself, and immediately used the lump sum payment to repay myself. As Brian Tracy points out, when you start saving, you start to feed the creative energy, and you will find more saving than you thought possible once you stick to your plan.

The results of this effort? In just under twenty months, I’d saved up enough money to not only have a two-month emergency fund, but enough money to pay for a wedding and a honeymoon. (Admittedly, it wasn’t the most expensive of either in the world, but for someone fresh out of seminary, it wasn’t bad.) And think: this was without even knowing anything about investing or setting up a retirement account. If the discipline was there with the knowledge I had then, who knows what will happen now that I have more investment knowledge to go with it.

What do you do to stand in your truth?

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There is a famous saying in politics. I don’t know how prevalent it is other places, but it usually comes up in the context of strange bedfellows on a particular issue:

Even a busted clock is right twice a day.

With this in  mind, I started to think about the question of what to do with the things that we read if we find the general tone of the book to be completely distasteful, and a lot of the information comes from an abhorrent place.

Did He Really Say That?

I first encountered this phenomenon while reading a book on what it takes to become rich. (Names will be withheld to protect the innocent, and because I don’t want to get into an argument about the merits of the book with people who like it. I simply want to explain my experience with the book.) As I read the book, I thought that there was a lot to be said for the idea that there is a necessary mindset to establish wealth that most of us simply don’t have.

However, when it came to practical advice, there were some things that I found appalling. For example, this book talked about how the author really enjoyed finding out about houses that banks were auctioning after foreclosure because that meant that he could make huge profits. Maybe it was because of the fact that I read this book while the United States is still in the midst of a financial crisis and record foreclosures, but I was surprised for two reasons: 1) It seemed to me to be woefully insensitive to lick one’s chops when finding out that a family lost its home; 2) I like the idea of making a profit by making things better for people, not by getting rich off of other people’s misery.

The Busted Clock

However, I did see some practical advice that I felt was, let’s just say, not morally offensive to my person. Reading about tax liens, and finding out later how they really work, seemed to me something that was beneficial to everyone involved. (The difference between a tax lien and a tax deed is that the former gives the property owner time to repay the tax debt in order to keep the property while the latter transfers it automatically.) So, do I throw out everything that this person said because I find some of his ideas to be repellent? I don’t think that is a good idea. I think that there is a difference when it comes to continuing to read someone like this (Depending on what the author writes about, I will not read it if I know that it is going down that path.) but I think that there are definitely times when we can find good ideas from anyone.

For example, I am currently reading a novel on personal development where some of the book itself goes into a bizarre place, and compares people who disagree with the author to emissaries of Satan. However, there are a lot of interesting ideas in the book, and I am going to continue to read it, because I know that I can overlook that element of the story. I am reminded of what someone who has never disappointed me in the world of personal development, Jim Rohn, and something that he had to say about trying to make as much money as you can:

I didn’t say that you should make as much as possible. I said you should make as much money as possible within the proper economic time and within your moral standards. I say “within the proper economic time” because you have to balance your work with the rest of your life. I say “within your moral standards” because you have to do good in order to live good.

To borrow an analogy from another Great Teacher, when the time of harvest comes, you will know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. If something works well and it fits your moral beliefs, learn that. There really are times when we can learn from everyone.

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Welcome to the third part of my series on the lessons of Citizen Kane. Today, I will talk about one of the key lessons in terms of personal development from this movie. While this is a movie that has a generally downward progression, there is still a key lesson that can be learned.

Declaration of Principles

One of the key elements of foreshadowing early in the movie comes just after Charles Foster Kane takes control of the New York Daily Inquirer. In the movie, it is a struggling daily paper that Kane’s guardian and executor of his fortune foreclosed. Kane decides that he wants to try to run the newspaper, and he brings his best friend, Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), who comes with Kane to work as a dramatic critic. Early in the movie, Kane is looking for something to make his paper unique, and he finally comes up with his answer: My Declaration of Principles. In the scene, he promises to give the news accurately and fairly, and to be a champion for the working man.

Jed Leland, however, warned Kane that he shouldn’t make promises unless he intends to keep them. Kane assures him that these would be kept. Leland serves as a moral compass, and he is my favorite character in the movie. At one point, Kane has a party celebrating the Inquirer‘s ranking as the highest-circulated paper in New York and buying all of the staff of the New York Chronicle. In the middle of the party, Kane is celebrating, and Leland is clearly worried. When Mr. Bernstein asks why, Leland explains that it is because he wonders whether or not Kane is keeping his principles, and whether or not the Chronicle reporters are really dedicated to the policies of Kane, or whether they will change him without him even knowing it.

The Hard Lessons of Principles

(NOTE: This part of the post contains spoilers. If you want to avoid them, please scroll to the end of the post.)

The next major point in the relationship between Kane and Leland comes 18 years later in 1916, when Charles Foster Kane ran for governor against entrenched political boss Jim W. Gettys. Leland is the first character to give a speech for the Kane campaign, calling him “that fighting liberal” and the man to clean up after the corruption of the Gettys Administration. By the end of the campaign, Kane is the heavy favorite. However, Leland seems to hold back his enthusiasm at the beginning of the speech, only giving in to the thrill of the crowd later.

While Kane is the heavy favorite, Gettys is not licked yet. Instead, he knows that Kane has been visiting a young girl, and whether there was an inappropriate relationship or not (which is somewhat vague in the movie), it certainly looked bad, and a story is planted about them. After the election, Leland tells him that he talks about the people as if he owns them, and he says that he wants to move to Chicago because he doesn’t want to be there after the election.

Then, when Kane is with his second wife, she premieres the Chicago Opera House. The rest of the reporters for the Chicago Inquirer give her positive reviews, but Leland is passed out in the back room. Kane and Mr. Bernstein walk in, and they see that he has started to write a bad review. Kane finishes the review Leland wanted to write, and fired him.

In another flashback, we find out that Leland was given a $25,000 severance check (Keep in mind that this part of the story took place in the 1920′s, so this was a substantial amount of money.), which Leland delivers to him ripped up with the Declaration of Principles. Kane tears up the Declaration of Principles.

The Lesson

This part of the movie shows the beginning of the deterioration of Kane’s life. However, the real point to me is what that moment says about Jed Leland, and about people in real life. Leland did the right thing. He went into the newspaper business as something that is described early in the movie as somewhat of a “college boy prank.” However, Leland is really an idealist at heart with unshakeable principles.

His true loyalty to the movie isn’t to Charles Foster Kane, or to himself, but to principles. While there, he is the one who always worries when principles are at risk, and he is willing to sacrifice in order to maintain his principles when they are challenged. When he is shown later in the movie, he is someone of a genial temperament who is at piece with the decisions he made in his life. So, no matter what it is that you want to do in life, never forget your own Declaration of Principles, but remember to hold to them like Jed Leland, not Charles Foster Kane.