What I Learned from “The Expendables”
By Nina Kaufman, Esq.Sylvester Stallone’s latest opus, The Expendables, was released in movie theaters this past weekend, and I have to confess that I’ve been dying to see it. Bash-em-up-smash-em-up films are a kind of guilty pleasure for me. Van Damme, Stallone, Schwartzenegger, Statham, Li, Willis–many of the actors in the film fill my list. And as long as they stick honorably to the genre of men fighting men or Evil (and not using women as pawns or sex objects), I’ll happily plunk down my $13 and sit for 2 hours mindlessly munching popcorn.
The Expendables didn’t disappoint. As John Notle on BigHollywood.com points out, it’s classic B-movie fare. It wasn’t just the simplistic plot: good-guy-misfits take-down-bad-third-world-dictators-and-their-U.S.-Government-puppeteers. It wasn’t just that it was rife with exceptionally muscled men over the age of 40 (my demographic) playing action heroes. (Nu? Should I turn up my nose up at eye candy?). It wasn’t just that every once in a whole, the camera caught Stallone with his dark eyebrows and goatee looking like an older Robert Downey Jr. in Ironman (yes, another guilty pleasure; bought the soundtrack, too, for the pounding AC/DC music). It wasn’t just the pyrotechnics and bad guys going “splat!” in multiple directions when mowed down by machine guns.
It’s that, tucked behind the humor of grown-up boys poking fun at their friends to show they care, there was a message: That honor matters more than a paycheck. That having a moral code matters. That sometimes, you help other people and you take a risk because it’s the right thing to do. And sometimes, you help others by making tough decisions that reflect your own self-respect.
I think of the risk I took starting a business partnership–not for the visions of the paycheck, but for the bigger dream of those I could serve. And I think of the touch choices I had to make when ending the partnership, because I needed to serve my own self-respect as well as my client’s needs.
Does that make make me a saint? Far from it. But I can be proud of my decisions because they were a product of my own moral code, which includes respect for myself and others.
What matters most to you in your business?
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