Rich Twin Poor Twin

I watched Sylvester Stallone’s latest Rocky movie. The Rocky Balboa character is a favorite of mine. The movie was great and finishes the loose ends in the Rocky Movie series and brings us back to that old Rocky we knew. My twin and I couldn’t help but notice how Sylvester knows what we know about the corporate world. There were scenes early in the movie where we see Rocky’s son working for a large company, getting bullied by his boss, hanging out with phony co-workers, drinking beer after work, working late hours, trying to climb the corporate ladder, and trying to fit in. His son even gets yelled at by his boss for getting in late – this was just hilarious because I know for a fact a lot of employees have this fear in them. Near the end of the movie, Rocky’s character actually confronts his son about what he sees in him and the direction he is heading towards. His son actually quits his job after that talk. This seemed a bit extreme and probably only happens in the movie, but I do know people who have taken similar actions. people would ask the same exact question as what Rocky asks his son after the news of quitting his job: “So what are you going to do now?” I don’t think Rocky wanted his son to quit his job but wanted to tell his son to go after what he really wanted and that he, himself is the only one who can create his own destiny. If he did not man up, he will be wasting the best times of his life and would always be asking and telling himself – “I could have been” or “Only if I tried or started earlier.”

Right after that scene we see Rocky’s brother-in-law get fired from his job after 40 years (?) at his 60′s with NOTHING to show for it – not even a gold watch. We even see what he really wanted to do – paint.

I’m not telling you to quit your job. Just start something you know you must do part time after work. It would just be financially unsound to chop off your only source of income especially if it is considered to be “middle” or “high”. If it is a flipping burger’s job – then just quit it. It is just so easy to make money these days that if you are reading this and have half a brain you can earn a “full” income if you let that beast in you guide you.

Believe it or not, my twin and I never watched this movie before until just a week ago. We were just taking a break from games, and happened to switch the channel to AMC’s movie channel with Scarface: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086250/ starring Al Pacino as Tony Montana. At first we were just going to switch the channel because it looked so old. But something kept us watching. Many times I hear jokes from people about dealing crack or selling drugs to make a fortune quickly today. This movie simply explored that path. Even though the film may seem to be too violent and tacky for some people, this film is brilliant and one of the best I have ever seen with Pacino portraying Tony Montana as a Cuban refugee on a path to get the “American Dream”. He was a guy who started with nothing and ended up with “the world”.

My twin and I kept commenting on how “hungry” this Tony Montana character was and how it reminded us of a part of ourselves. Hungry as in aiming high and expecting nothing less than what he wanted. He was also dead honest to himself and with everyone around him. There is a scene in the movie with Tony and his friend Manny on the sandy beach of Miami after they worked for Sosa for 3 months. Tony says: €œLook at this place. It’s paradise. If I was here 10 years ago, I would be a millionaire by now.”

That statement holds true in real-life and holds truer today in the information age with the power of the internet. However, very few people actually take advantage of it because they are just not hungry enough and they do not have a good grasp on how businesses are run.

Throughout the movie, Tony refers to securing supplies of drugs, selling and distributing drugs, laundering money, and taking out rivals as a €œBusiness.€ He knew that his efforts would pay him off in the future. For Tony, he was able to sleep at night knowing what his business was doing. This is probably because he used the drugs himself. To him, it was perfectly ok and was just illegal because politicians didn’t want to get voted out of office if they tried to legalize the drugs. If you’re reading this, you probably won’t be the type of person who can sleep with himself if you ran a Billion dollar drug distribution business no matter how much money you are racking in. But like Tony, you must know all the parts that make a business run and know that a business is a system that puts money in your pockets when all is said and done. I found it very ironic that the downfall of Tony was when he started to work €œin€ his business rather than working €œon€ it and using the drugs he was selling.

One of my favorite movies is Rocky. In the sequel, Rocky 2, there was a line that summed it all up. It was when Rocky and Andrean were talking in their new home. Rocky tells Adrean that he was thinking about going to fight one last time, even though the doctors said he should retire. Adrean tells Rocky that she can still work in the pet shop while he searches for another job and that they can somehow make ends meet. Rocky then says “I don’t want us to live like that. I want us to have the good things in life.”

It was a decision to either settle down and just eek through life or to fight back. Not just fight in the ring but fight for the God given right that everyone has – to live the life they want.

We saw The Matrix when we were in high school and didn’t really think too deeply about what the movie was trying to tell us. We, like most other viewers, just liked the action scenes and the shooting. We recently watched the movie again and it told us a story that we could relate to. First of all, we had different meanings or ideas associated with the title of the movie The Matrix. When we first saw the movie, we were busy in school and had already taken Linear Algebra and knew the word matrix in the mathematical sense. So when we saw the movie we noticed or picked up on numbers in the movie. However, it wasn’t until we worked in the corporate world that we kept hearing the phrase “matrix organization” where there was a big boss, and under him was four or so lower level bosses and under those were lower level bosses and it kept going on and on. The message of go to work, conform, work hard to get a yearly bonus, and work until you are old enough to retire can be heard from today’s world. It is a world where everyone who wants safety and security must conform and please their bosses. It is a world where behaving like robots is the norm; where creativity and deep thinking is looked upon as unproductive. This is where the masses live their lives.

In the movie, we noticed a lot more suits, not just the agents but employees of large companies who all looked the same – walking in single file to and from work. Many people work throughout their lives living in The Matrix searching for security and safety in their job to secure a single source of income or cashflow while giving up more and more of their freedom, individuality, and precious time.

The robots in the movie needed the humans to stay asleep to give them a secure source of energy. They gave nutrition and cocooned the humans in the pink slimy pits so that they could secure a reliable source of energy. Much like the robots, companies and the government milk employees while giving them just enough nutrition with pay checks, benefits, and the promise of retirement to keep them from wanting to or consciously choosing to wake up from their secure little offices and cubicles.

It’s a struggle between wanting to feel safe and secure and wanting to be free. Humans have a need to feel safe and secure, however if it is taken to the extreme it means giving up all your freedom. Do you want to be totally safe and secure? Just go to jail. Yea prison, the big house, the cell, jail, whatever you want to call it. They feed you, bath you, clothe you, and even groom you. You will get the most security there. That’s why they call it Maximum Security.

Many people don’t make the conscious decision to wake up and start thinking about their financial situation, what their true purpose in life is or what they really want to do. So they jump from job to job looking for a higher raise, or work longer hours, or work in a second job looking to make more money “ thinking that that will solve their financial troubles, and use their money to spend on bigger and bigger toys to smooth their pain or the aching feeling when one’s soul is denied its say. Some even pretend or make themselves believe that what they are doing or living is what they TRUELY want. These people will say: “I love my job. Money is not important. Or Money can’t buy happiness.” Just take their paychecks from them and see if they will stay doing what they are doing at their jobs. There are even people who tear down others who have made it by ridiculing and spreading lies with their worker friends about them just to make themselves sleep better at night.

So have you made the conscious decision to wake up and start taking control of your life and making it the way you want it to be? The real world is not like the movie, The Matrix, where you take a pill and are magically awakened. But I promise you this, if you get to a point in your life where you know the path that lies ahead of you is not where you want to go, you can instantly change your entire course. You just have to want it enough and believe you can do it even though you don’t have all the answers yet; let faith guide you. A word of warning, waking up is just the first step and finding out the path that leads you to where you want to be is another important step. However it is important to realize that it is totally different between knowing the path and walking it. Once you even have clues on where you want to be and do, start. Just start. Take tiny steps and you are already on your way.

Funny movie with Jim Carrey that deals with something that happened and is still happening in real life. Behind the laughs is the all too real desperation, fear, anger, greed and Noobishness from the people Jim Carrey plays when one finds out that he is out of money and sometimes even worse, out of time.

Funny movie that sheds light on what happens when one does not take full responsiblity for one’s financial future. However, the movie does not show us how to really get out of it or fix one’s financial problem or improve it.

This is what happens when you come out from college and get a job and when you want more money you go back to school looking for “answers” while not knowing the difference between an asset and a hole in the ground: http://richtwinpoortwin.com/blog/2005/12/combat-blindness-in-cs/

We recently went to a movie in NYC with some friends and watched the limited release film – Capote. We were going to watch Syriana but many of us didn’t like George Clooney and the tickets for the hour we wanted to watch the movie was sold out. So we went to see Capote. The theater that we went to was really small. There were like 5 columns of seats on each side of the screen. My twin and I were like “What the hell did we get ourselves into?" after the first 5 minutes into the movie. It was like in a twilight zone – in a crappy theater with lots of other people watching this mess and the others are like pretending to like it. My twin turned to me and asked – “Are we really watching this? Are these people for real? Can we get our money back?" Anyway, we did sit through the movie; we saw worse movies than this one – as in more boring. And actually I’m glad we sat through it.

Capote is a movie about the man Capote who wrote "In Cold Blood" in a time where American writers were treated as celebrities with fame, fortune, respect, and praise. Now the only real thing going for Capote, as what my twin and I pointed out was that he had 1 thing no one else had. And that was Confidence which overshadowed any obvious flaws the man had. When he spoke, people listened. When he had an idea, he brought it into reality simply through his confidence in himself and his abilities. “I have a 94% recall," was his catch phrase to impress others and boost about himself in an amusing way. The obvious flaws we see from this Capote is that

1. He has a really weak speaking voice – he sounds like a woman – it was annoying and almost unbearable.

2. He was openly a homo – at a time when gays were bashed and forbidden to come forth.

3. He was very conceited, greedy, uncaring for others, and a liar – he did not care about other’s work even his friends’ and put down their works – in his words: "I don’t see what all the fuss is all about."

4. He had a big drinking and smoking problem which ultimately killed him.

But what made everyone stay in that theater that night, what made the people in the movie listen to him whenever he spoke, what made him the greatest and most famous American writer, and why there is a movie on his guy, was one thing – it was how blatantly confident he was in himself and in his skills and abilities to get what he wanted into his reality. However, in the end what he brought into reality cost more than what he had to gain.

It is also true in real life to an extent – where confidence can bring certainty and into reality some things that you want – in business, school, games, life. However, there is something even more powerful than confidence. We will share that in a future article and you can decide for yourself.

I hope all of you had a Merry Christmas. It’s A Wonderful Life is a good classic movie. It will always bring back fond memories. For many years since we can remember, my twin and I saw the classic movie: It’s A Wonderful Life air at our old home. We switched the channel every year when the movie just started because the movie is in black and white. We just dismissed the movie and thought it would be a bore. A few years later when we were in college, freshman year…. one of our best professors we had in our academic years had this movie as part of the curriculum – where we watched the movie and did the usual analysis on the movie. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was a very good professor and person. He actually was searching for a purpose, more in life, the meaning of life, happiness in life, the reason for living, etc. He was actually trying to wake us up. But I digress; we will talk about this professor in upcoming entries. Now back to It’s a wonderful life. The movie is quite enjoyable.

We recently went back to NYC this Christmas and watched It’s a Wonderful life for the first time in our old home. I recall the analysis we did after watching the show in college. We all came up with the all too familiar analysis of how Potter was rich, greedy, and evil. And how George Bailey was the good person, the hero who was doing what was right – he was fighting the good fight so that everyone else can have a wonderful life in Bedford Falls.

There was a common theme painted throughout the movie: being good/doing good meant sacrificing yourself – physically, mentally, and financially- George risked his life to save his brother Harry (lost his hearing in his left ear), getting beaten up by his childhood boss after saving a client from being poisoned, taking a job that was below him in order to save the Bank and the community from Potter, getting married to Mary because just to make his mother happy, turning down Sam Wayne Wright’s offer, giving away 2 thousand dollars of his own hard earned money he saved for his honeymoon to others during the bank run on black Friday, and turning down Potter’s offer that would have freed him.

It’s A Wonderful Life enforces the idea that having money meant you are greedy, evil, selfish, lazy, cruel, racist, lonely, bitter, uncaring, and that you will lose your money as fast as you made it throughout the movie. Potter was the living symbol of this commonly accepted false idea. Potter is a “warped, frustrated, old man.” He was crippled and pushed around in a wheelchair. He has no family, was uncaring – he called for a board meeting to resolve the bank after Bailey Senior’s death, was a racist – he refers to his tenants as “garlic eaters”, has a skull on his desk, cruel – he withholds foolish Uncle Ben’s $8000 cash deposit just to get back at the Baileys, and he levied harsh rent from his poor tenants, and on the last scene where we see what would happen if he controlled Bedford falls – it would be called Potter’s field where Bedford falls is just a grave yard, there would be less of the “neighborly”, lots of bars, clubs, and gambling.

But when we watched the movie at home, we see that the movie: It’s a Wonderful Life is nothing more than propaganda. Its message is worse than its character Potter, himself. The movie tells its audience to just Settle. That is perhaps the worst and most dangerous message of all – be a noob, don’t even try to become a pwner. The movie’s message tells you to just try to find the good things that you have and not to try harder, not to help yourself, not to pursue your dreams, and just help others because you are seen as greedy if you try to pursue your dreams before helping others. In short – mind others businesses, help as many as you can with what little you have and look for “the good things” that you have and you shall be happy and you will have a wonderful life. The last message of the movie was ” A man is never poor as long as he has friends,” which is true to some degree but the movie’s bigger message and idea is troubling.

What if Clarence showed George Bailey actually achieving what he wanted?? As in showing George what he, his wife, and the rest of Bedford Falls would be if George would have achieved what he wanted to do – go to college, travel the world, build bridges, build skyscrapers, and become what he wanted to BE since he was a small boy – in short living his childhood dream. But instead Clarence CHEATED him and US by just showing how unhappy the community would be if he was not born. And it is very fascinating how Sam Wayne Wright becomes what George Bailey always wanted to be – rich, traveling the world, having a company, wives, power, fame, fancy cars and FREE from having to put his nose to the grind stone.

And that is all I have to say about that. Or what Sam would say, “Hee-Haw!”