In the film “Wall Street,” a broker who is about to lose his job and perhaps his freedom, is advised that when a person stares into the abyss he takes a true measure of his strength.

Today, I read an article about an entrepreneur who poured his life savings into a home furnishings outlet in a rapidly growing village in the southwest, only to see the economy tank, houses foreclosed and a mass exodus from the town timed almost exactly to the opening of his shop.

In the article, he stands alone in a deserted parking lot surrounding a ghost town strip small, a black hole of sorts sucking in his dreams and all that he has worked for to this point.

The shop is his abyss. What does he see as he stares vacantly at it?

Some years ago, my mother’s common law husband told me a story of his days as an alcoholic, roaming the mean streets of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. On one nightmare of a day in a broken life marked by chaos, he hit bottom, alone and bleeding on the steps of a church. Rescued by a stranger, he was taken to a hospital to be treated, yes, but more than that, to stare into the abyss.

What did he see?

I am reading now about FDR’s first 100 days and the character traits that guided him to navigate through the second darkest period in US history. His most improbable trait was born years before when as a vibrant and athletic young man of wealth and power, he was stricken overnight with polio. Staring at the ceiling, struggling with the idea of himself as a “cripple,” he looked into the abyss.

What did he see?

In every single human life, there is an abyss. Or two. Or more. It comes in business. In family. In our own sense of who we are, who we are not, the options in front of us, the opportunities we cultivated and those we let slip by.

In a sense, staring into the abyss is often the darkest hour. It cannot be belittled. It cannot be romanticized. It is a true and painful test.

I believe, however, that there are only two visions we can see when we stare into the abyss: endless and hopeless darkness or a tableau of what we will paint with our future once the terror passes.

My mother’s soul mate built a loving life with one of the kindest women in the world. Franklin Delano Roosevelt found a blueprint for becoming President of the United States.

What we see and what we do with the vision, shapes us more than anything in life.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Images courtesy: 1, 2, 3

As we worry about our raises and recessions, our relationships and our romances, the wheels of the machine keep moving obliviously to the soap operas of our lives.

The sun revolves on its axis: it never pauses for a day in deference to the delights or the disappointments we may face. The earth journeys around the sun, unstoppable. The clock ticks. Babies are born at the very moment families die head first in the Hudson River, pieces of broken flying machines caught up in the murky currents.

When you first fall in new love, you are certain this glow will never fade. Not this magical one. When a loved one dies, you are convinced the pain will never relent. Not this time. And then the machine takes over.

The moon appears, full and silver, and just when you feel you own it, it begins to shrink, night by night, until it virtually disappears only to begin to march back to full bloom in the space of a month. Every month.

At the shore, the waves drive up from the ocean to the beach in a steady and unstoppable drum roll. In and out. Back and forth. The gears of the universe are linked in a constant and irreversible movement we know nothing about. All we can really know, is that we are swept up in its force. Humans along for the ride for as long as the ride endures. We don’t get to decide when it ends. Rarely an advance warning.

In this grand and daunting show of power, all we can do is race. Move full speed to accomplish some form of greatness, some ounce of true value, so that we are not merely tumbleweed blown across the prarie by the winds of the relentless, calculating, driven engine of time.

We all have goals, dreams we would like to accomplish, works of art we want to create, companies we want to grow, ideas we would love to sow, people we want to know, fears we want to conquer, peaks we want to climb, breakthroughs we hope to achieve.

Whether we do so or not depends on how and if we perceive the race. Nothing waits for us. The machine never stalls. The gears do not rest. The stop watch is always on.

Rest? Why should I rest? Ever. The waterfall of time is my competitor. If I want to win, I must race ahead of the curve and accomplish something great, something more, something enduring, before it washes over me.

Mark Stevens
CEO

Image courtesy: Flickr

Okay, so the nation is stuck in the quicksand of a subprime crisis, millions are driving away from their split levels, banks are hemorrhaging red ink, the battered stock market is teetering on a free fall, and President Obama’s first day as Commander-in-Chief will be focused on declaring war on a full-blown recession.

As wise and creative as he may prove to be, he will likely tackle it the wrong way: the economists’ way, with all kinds of technical maneuvers five people in the Monetary Brain Trust pretend to understand. They will jiggle the discount rate and manipulate the money supply and create guaranteed mortgages and dole out health insurance and play 101 Washington games that completely avoid why we got into this morass in the first place and why we will do it again and again and again and again.

We formalize it all and make it sound inevitable by calling it economic cycles, but it’s really just a total personal failure on the part of Americans to treat money with the respect it deserves. Does this mean to worship money? Of course not. But it does mean to respect what money can and cannot do for you.

We all work for money. We all earn it. We all want it. The difference between the members of the religion of the rich and the atheists of the rich is that the former truly achieve financial independence from it while the latter watch it slip through their hands. And no matter how much they earn, they never feel rich. And they never are.

The idea is not to make as much money as you can, but instead to live life as fully and completely as possible. Of course, the two intersect. You need money to own a nice home (one you can actually afford), to vacation, to send your children to school, to weather the inevitable storms and curve balls, to indulge in luxuries now and then, to retire if and when you want, and to walk away from your boss or your client when they don’t deserve your time and your talent.

The only way to have this kind of wealth, this wealthy life, this independence, is to:

* Recognize that the most important money you have is the money no one can see. It is the money you don’t spend, it is the money that builds your financial bedrock, it is the money you worked for, yes, but that then turns around and works for you because it is invested in appreciable assets.

* Learn the importance of making money while you are sleeping. No one of real wealth earns it, grows it, and keeps it by simply working harder. They work smarter. They find a way to create a portfolio and\or to build a business that generates profits while they are fast asleep in their beds or dozing on a beach.

* Stop spending a dime to impress other people. This is incredibly shallow, hollow, and self-defeating. It prompts millions to buy homes and cars and Christmas gifts they cannot afford. It makes them slaves to jobs they hate, to bosses and careers they detest. It assures they will never have financial independence. It is the real reason for the mortgage crisis. It is the real reason people don’t have the money to retire after a life of labor. It is the real reason why people with no money for health insurance spend hundreds on lottery tickets. It is the real reason why men, women, and entire families with very significant incomes have no money in the bank and need sleeping pills to escape the night.

Working hard is noble. Working smart is even better. Making money this hard, along with smart work, produces a wonderful reward.

But unless you treat that money with respect, unless you live below your means, unless you treat the creation and protection of wealth as a near religious experience, you will always wonder why it’s you who comes up short.

When it’s no mystery at all.
Mark Stevens
CEO