$106 and a Whole Lot of Meaning

The story of Rocky is one of my favorite Hollywood tales of all time. Heck, it's one of my favorite stories - period - of all time. In the early 1970s, Sylvester Stallone was a poor, unknown actor living in NYC. Eventually, he decided to move across the country and become a poor, unknown actor living in Los Angeles. By poor, I mean poor poor. He had no car, only $106 to his name, and eventually had to sell his dog to pay the bills. Yeah, that variety of poor.

But Sylvester believed in himself. He wrote a script about a down-and-out, underdog boxer named Rocky Balboa. When he shopped it to the movie studios, they loved it! They offered him $25,000. He had one condition, though: He would star in it. "Absolutely not!" the studios said. The financial offers for the script increased, on the condition that he would sell it and move on. This was a winning script, and some of Hollywood's premier actors were already being eyed to portray this Rocky Balboa character. Still, Sylvester refused. The offers kept going up... and Sylvester kept refusing. Eventually, the offers would get as high as $360,000 (more than $2M in today's dollars).

As Sylvester tells the story, he was already used to being poor, so he wasn't going to sell his dream of becoming an actor for a juicy bag of cash. He wasn't just talking the talk.....he was walking the walk. He had a hundred bucks to his name and was barely putting food on the table, while simultaneously turning down massive, life-changing money.

We all know how the story ends. Finally, one of the studios decided to green-light the movie with Sylvester at the helm and as the star. They gave him a total budget of $1M, which was embarrassingly low, even back then. It was a massive gamble, and it easily could have ruined his barely-existent career. He hired his friends and family to fill roles, used cheap equipment, and found other creative ways to save money. Ultimately, the film grossed north of $200M and won three Oscars, including Best Picture. The rest, as they say, is history.

The world is full of what-ifs when it comes to the intersection of work, meaning, and money. If Sylvester Stallone had simply taken the bag, we might never know his name. Rocky probably wouldn't be what it is today in our culture. Sylvester might have failed at his dream of becoming an actor. Sure, he would have become instantly wealthy, but the rest would have been erased from history. What if?

How many other what-ifs exist out there? How many people quit or sold out instead of aggressively pursuing meaning? Some of the greatest gifts ever given to society have come on the heels of people choosing meaning over money. Some of the greatest gifts society has been robbed of have come after people chose money over meaning.

It's a story worth thinking about. No, most of us won't become as rich and famous as Sylvester, but his story and his mindset are something we can all learn from and internalize. Always meaning over money.

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