Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2014 when the film had just been released in Spain.
Just as I felt that the Steve Jobs film turned out to be one of the worst movies ever made, the film about the life of Jordan Belfort, nicknamed “The Wolf of Wall Street”, is an excellent piece of work, especially once you know the life of the real “Wolf”.
The film also has its downside: 50% of the running time (if not 80%) is a non-stop sequence of excess in every kind of vice and madness. First sex and drugs, followed by more sex and more drugs. But according to some people who knew the real Wolf, that was his life, and they say it was far worse than what the film shows. In other words, Scorsese didn’t overdo it to keep to his usual signature style; if anything, this time he held back.
Even so, beyond the entertainment, we can draw some lessons that apply very well to a person’s career.
Sales skills are everything
To begin with, Jordan Belfort’s success on Wall Street had nothing to do with his investing skills and everything to do with his talent for sales.
The Wolf could sell anything to anyone. As we’ve said on several occasions, if you master sales, you master everything, because in any profession you’re selling: your image, your brand, your company or your product. One way or another, you sell.
The Wolf was probably a reflection of his first mentor, played by Matthew McConaughey, who had a very particular idea of what the Wall Street business consists of: taking clients’ money and putting it in your own pocket. The client doesn’t matter; what matters is their money and how much of it they’ll put in your pocket.
To Wall Street, clients are idiots
Matthew McConaughey’s speech may well give food for thought to some investors who step onto the Wall Street casino wheel, where the clients who lose make money for the “house”, and the ones who win only do so on screen, while the house takes real money through commissions.
The penny stock market
This is the part where I personally felt like an idiot, because I’ve bought penny stocks myself. So somewhere on Wall Street, someone I paid €100 in commission to buy those shares must have me on a list as one of those “morons”.
Leadership lessons
The Wolf wasn’t just a con man with a talent for sales; he was also a person with surprising leadership skills. It wasn’t his parties full of drugs and sex that drew the crowds, but his speeches.
He was a son of a b… to the rest of the industry and to his gullible clients, but he protected his own people, and he genuinely meant to help those who believed and trusted in him and his projects.
It’s said that the real Wolf told the FBI to go to hell, preferring to serve decades in prison rather than inform on his people, although for some reason he eventually agreed to cooperate.
If you’re going to war, take the right people for that war
The first men in the Wolf’s business weren’t Wall Street whizz kids, but people so unhappy with the life they’d been dealt that, given the chance to get rich, they’d put in 300% of their effort to make it happen. A marijuana dealer with a talent for selling and several salesmen working for junk companies on junk salaries were taught by the great sales master not only to sell junk to junk clients, but eventually to sell junk to elite clients.
In the end, The Wolf of Wall Street shows us the harshest but most real face of Wall Street, where deception, manipulation of information and market prices, and all kinds of shady financial outfits are the order of the day.
It’s almost three hours of film and you certainly won’t be bored. If you don’t want to dwell on the lessons we can take from it, you can always enjoy all sorts of action scenes, sex and more sex (very explicit), and a few touches of humour.
And that was Jordan Belfort‘s life: a life full of constant passion and dreams fulfilled, and even though many of those dreams weren’t legitimate, he fulfilled them.
Watch: The Wolf of Wall Street trailer
Further reading
Featured image: Tai Lopez, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
