What Oscar-Winning Movies Can Teach Us About Business
What can we learn from some of the Oscar winning movies?
The King’s Speech: Resiliency wins. There is no magic bullet to being successful in business. The King didn’t show up one day to work with Lionel Logue and he was cured. It took decades of work for the King to make effective speeches. Only persistence and hard work can inch business owners towards their goals.
Black Swan: Competition is all around you: Some of it is real, some maybe imagined, but the real competition is with your own business vision. It is critical to keep perspective. This is where trusted mentors can be helpful.
The Fighter: It always takes hard work. There is no faking your way to success in business. Dicky Eklund could have become a champion like his brother, Mickey Ward if had been serious about working harder.
127 Hours: Be creative. Sometimes business solutions take a long time to appear. It is only when you have tried everything else, then solution becomes evident. Also, never work alone since it can be dangerous!
The Social Network: Greed is powerful. Business success and wealth can bring out in the worst in people. Read every contract. Eduardo Saverin did not read the new stock agreement when Facebook took its first outside investor. This caused his large dilution in the next investment round. When it comes to legal documents, trust no one. Pay your own lawyer.
Inception: Is this a dream? Dreaming about your business is powerful aphrodisiac. But those dreams need to be based in reality. Do customers by your product to solve a specific pain?
The Kids Are All Right: It takes a team. Building a business (or a family) is not a one person job. In fact, the only way to leverage financial success is to have an effective management team. Business is not about ideas, it’s about the execution of those ideas by your team.
Toy Story 3: Change is inevitable. No business stays the same forever. Markets and customers evolve. The only question is, how do we adapt?
What did you learn?
