Our Most Precious Commodity

Gordon Gekko: Greed captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

I recently watched the two "Wall Street" movies. I had never seen the 1987 version with Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox and Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko. In the 2010 Oliver Stone sequel Bud Fox makes a cameo appearance but Gordon Gekko is one of the central characters. He is a rapacious speculator who is only interested in the game of amassing as much money as possible. Though as he says often and easily, he is not interested in the money. Money is only the measure by which you know if you are winning the game.  But in the end, even Gekko recognizes that the $100 million that he stole from his daughter and only living relative is not as important as the relationship that he would like to have with her and her imminent family.

Our most precious commodity is the relationships we have. One might say that Gekko transformed from someone whose primary relationship was with money to someone who valued the art of the deal to someone who wanted relationships of love and trust. What has value is relationship and what has most value are the relationships we construct which have the greatest depth and complexity. The more robust are our relationships, the more precious they are.