What I Learned From a Bad Movie!

June 29, 2012

Over the last weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing a new movie.  I really love going to the movies, but I rarely do it.  And when I do, it’s usually a Disney or Pixar movie with my kids.  So, it was a rare treat for me to get to go out with a friend and see a non-animated movie.  Being completely clueless about what movies were in theaters now, I deferred the decision to my friend who chose “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” in 3D.  She had read the book and loved it, and she knew that I like historical fiction – books that take historical events and get “creative” with it.

By the time we left the theater and put our 3D glasses in the recycle basket we were both a bit disappointed.  For her, the movie didn’t even come close to living up to the book.  Not having read the book, I didn’t have an opinion.  As a movie viewer, the 3D effects added very little to the experience and the movie wasn’t all that compelling.  It was very predictable, and less than 48 hours later, I can’t even remember the basic outline of the plot.  On top of the disappointment, the tickets were nearly $20 each because of the 3D effects and popcorn, candy & drinks were another $25.  That was a lot of money for a not very pleasant experience.  We joked after the movie that we could have had more fun with an inexpensive bottle of wine and a picnic basket with some fruit & cheese in a beautiful park.  We could have “people watched” with a much more nutritious snack for a fraction of the cost of our movie experience.  And, after the park, we could have rented a movie from Redbox for $1.   Being a newly single guy, I’m always looking for inexpensive ideas for nights out.  So, if you have any…please post them in the comments section.  And, that sounds like it might just be a good topic for a future blog, too.

Back to the movie we actually saw though, rather than the “what might have been” of a people-watching park picnic… (try to say that quickly a few times)  I have noticed that when I talk to people in 1-on-1 counseling sessions, there is some “historical fiction” in our conversations.  As humans, we are reluctant to look in the mirror and accept that we are fallible and make mistakes.  Here are a few examples of what I’m talking about:

• When talking with people about investing and how they don’t want to suffer losses like they did in 2008, there is rarely a reflection back to pre-2008 investing and that perhaps the investor was a bit more aggressive than they should have been based on their goals.
• The same thing happens when talking about real estate transactions over the last 5-7 years.  Lots of people got caught up in the euphoria of quickly rising prices and bought into a bubble.  The flip side of the “let’s try to make money quickly” stories are the stories of spending habits and living just beyond what your income can sustain.
• Talking to people about how they got into credit card debt that threatens their long term financial security, the initial telling of the story always focuses on external factors rather than their behavior and spending habits.

What I’m trying to point out isn’t that people messed up or made mistakes.  We ALL do that!!!  Even financial planners who write blogs about personal financial matters. The point I’m trying to make is that until we have the ability to look in the mirror and say “hey, I messed up,” we aren’t in the best position to learn from it.  We can blame the economy, Wall Street, politicians, our spouses, our kids, etc. but until we have the courage to admit that “it was me who messed up,” we are likely to repeat our mistakes.  I know I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I’ve learned from them.  (Worst investment ever was a dotcom stock about 24 hours before the dotcoms crashed; I had held out because I didn’t believe that businesses could operate without profits but got tired of hearing how much money everyone else was making in those stocks so I bought one…and it went straight down in under a week!)  When that happened, I had to point the finger at myself and admit that I allowed external factors (other people making money) to influence an internal factor (my desire to make money a.k.a. greed….) and I made a bad call.  I messed up.  Because I was able to blame myself and admit fault, I was able to learn from that and I won’t allow myself to make the same mistake twice.

What can you do?  Look at areas in your financial life that aren’t the way you’d like them.  Be brutally honest with yourself.  Sure, there are factors outside of your control that impact every situation, but what factors ARE under your control.  What factors can you influence?  How can you learn from your mistakes?  Just because we mess up, it doesn’t make us bad people, it just makes us people…The ability to learn from our mistakes and not create a revisionist historical fiction can be one of the keys to our longer term successes.