Watch These 5 Movies To Make More Money & Grow Your Business
1 May 2026 · 19 min
In this episode of The $100 MBA Show, host Omar Zenhom presents a non‑traditional business education by extracting practical entrepreneurial lessons from five popular movies: Moneyball, Cast Away, The Prestige, The Founder, and Whiplash. He argues that movies can convey visceral, decision‑making experiences that business schools cannot, and he walks listeners through a specific scene from each film, linking the narrative moment to a concrete business principle. The Moneyball segment highlights the power of spotting overlooked market metrics (on‑base percentage) to gain a competitive edge. Cast Away illustrates the importance of leveraging immediate constraints and taking action with whatever resources are at hand, rather than waiting for perfect conditions. The Prestige demonstrates how total personal commitment—making one’s craft inseparable from life—creates extraordinary performance. The Founder focuses on relentless execution, showing that ideas alone are worthless without disciplined implementation, while also warning about the reputational costs of ruthless tactics. Whiplash emphasizes self‑imposed standards that exceed external validation, urging entrepreneurs to hold themselves to a higher bar regardless of audience. Throughout, Omar intersperses sponsor reads (Comcast Business, Square, Quo, Etsy) and calls to action for reviews, subscriptions, and related episodes. The episode’s core message is to watch these films with a business‑owner lens, pause at the highlighted moments, and apply the extracted lessons to grow revenue and scale a business.
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Oh no, not a good idea, Billy. Old man Justice. Why is that?
Steinbrenner is so pissed at his decline that he's willing to eat a big chunk of his contract just to get rid of him.
Exactly. 10 years ago, David Justice, big name, been a lot of big games. He's going to really help our season tickets early in the year. But we get into dog days in July and August, he's lucky if he's going to hit his weight. Billy, his legs are gone. Billy, he's a defensive liability, and I question whether the bat speed's still there. His legs are gone, Grady. We'll be lucky to get 60 games out of him. Why do you like him?
Because he gets on base. Did you see that? Every single person in that room is experienced, has been doing it for decades, has been doing it for longer than Billy Bean has been alive. Every single person was completely wrong. Not because they're stupid, because they're using the wrong metrics. They're trying to win a game they can't win using the metrics they want to use. And because everyone around them is using the same wrong metrics, nobody is noticing it. That's what makes it so dangerous is that everybody just goes along with it. When the entire industry is doing something the wrong way, the wrong way starts to look like the right way. You need a Billy Bean moment in your business. I had a moment like this in my own business when I was building and growing my software company, Webinar Ninja. You know, we couldn't compete with the big giants like Zoom and GoToMeeting when it came to the technology, but we realized that all of them were ignoring customer support. They really dropped the ball there. And we decided we're going to go all in on support and be the best in the game. And that gave us an incredible advantage because we were there for our customers 24/7. Anytime they had a question, anytime they needed support, our agents would sometimes jump on their webinar and help them host it. The lesson I'm trying to give you from this movie, from this moment, from this experience, is that the market rewards those who see value others miss. Find where your industry's conventional wisdom is just unchallenged and go ahead and fill that gap. That's an opportunity. For us, everybody was dropping the ball. Customer support, it was the worst. If you ever tried to reach out to any of these big companies, it takes 3 or 4 days to get a response. It's ridiculous. We said, no, everybody's going to get a response within 60 seconds. We just totally crushed it. And that's how we differentiate ourselves. Movie number 2, Castaway. Yep. Castaway with Tom Hanks. He plays a character called Chuck Noland, who is a FedEx engineer who's obsessed with efficiency and systems. As you might know, his plane goes down over the Pacific Ocean and he washes up to a deserted island. He's totally alone. Nobody else. No team, no tools, no plan. And he doesn't wait to be rescued. He starts to realize no one's going to come to save him, and he builds with what he already has right now in front of him. Let's watch a specific clip we need to talk about.
I did it!
"Fire!" Listen, I'm not embarrassed to admit I've done that scream. Not about fire, but about a landing page that finally converted, about a podcast episode that broke the download record for us, about a software feature that we released in 48 hours. When you're building something, especially early on, especially alone, the small wins feel enormous. And they should, because they are. Because here's the thing that a lot of people don't talk about is that when you're building something, especially early on, especially alone, the small wins feel enormous. And they should, because they are enormous. Because here's the other thing I want you to take from the scene. Count how many times he's failed before it actually lit into a fire. He never said, I'll start when I have better tools or when a lighter kind of washes up from the ocean. He worked with what was in front of him, what he had right now with bloody hands. That's business. Every single person that I've seen over the years, the last 20 years in business that have failed at building something, it's because of one thing. They are just waiting. They're waiting for funding. They're waiting for the right moment. They're waiting for the right team. They're waiting. They're waiting. They're waiting. In this movie, Chuck, he's stranded for 4 years on this island. He didn't wait. He started building really quickly. Here's the lesson I want you to take away. Listen closely. The constraints in front of you are not the obstacle. They are the education that you need to move forward. They're going to teach you something, right? I love the book The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday, because it teaches you this. Stop waiting until conditions are perfect. They will never be perfect. And guess what? When you do something, when things are not perfect, when they're in the worst timing, the worst condition, that means you can pull something off even at the best conditions. No matter what happens, you are unstoppable. So start with what's in front of you right now. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, detailing cars, or running a design studio, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. Take payments at a kiosk, counter, website, or with your phone, all synced in real time. With Square, you can track sales, manage inventory, and access reports whether you're in your shop on the go, or running things solo. Plus, Square supports every major payment method, including tap-to-pay, and offers instant access to your earnings through Square Checking. Running a business involves a lot of moving parts, and Square helps simplify that. The hardware looks polished and fits right into your space without feeling intrusive, and the software is incredibly straightforward and intuitive. With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. And why wait? Right now you can get up to $200 off Square hardware at square.com/go/MBA. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E.com/go/MBA. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Whether you realize it or not, so many customers slip through the cracks if you don't have a system. Missed calls, follow-ups that never happen. It all adds up fast. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the business communication system built so you never miss a call. This is the system you need so that you don't miss those precious customers. With Quo, calls, texts, voicemails, transcripts, and contact details are all in one clean view. So your team always has the full picture and can show up for every customer conversation, ensuring a seamless and more personalized experience. This is what excellence looks like. Everyone on your team sees the full thread, replies are faster, and customers actually feel taken care of. And QWO works wherever you are, right from your phone or computer. Keep your existing number, add teammates in minutes, sync your CRM, and let the call routing handle itself as you scale. Money's on the line. Always say hello with QWO. Try QWO for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to qwo.com/mdb. MBA. That's qo.com/MBA. Movie number 3, one of my favorite movies of all time, The Prestige. If you've never seen The Prestige, the theme of this movie is obsession is the price of greatness. I want you to just stop for a moment and just hear that again. Obsession is the price of greatness. In this film, two rival magicians back in the day in Victorian London The first one is Robert Angier, played by Hugh Jackman. He's charming, he's theatrical, and he's audience obsessed. The other magician is Alfred Borden, played by Christian Bale. He's technically brilliant and absolutely maniacal about his craft. There's a scene I want you to watch. It's early on in the movie. It's almost like a throwaway scene, but it contains the most important insight about what separates truly extraordinary performers from everyone else.
You're wrong.
Can't be.
No, it is.
Look at the man.
This is the trick. This is a performance right here. This is why no one can detect his method.
Oh, I love this movie. This man has been pretending to be crippled for years. Not on stage, but in his life. Every time he leaves the house, every time someone sees him, every moment. Because if he's caught walking normally even once, the greatest trick of his career is absolutely over. There is no off switch. The act and the life are the same thing. Now, I'm not telling you to deceive people. That is not the lesson. The lesson is the level of commitment, the willingness to structure your entire existence around the pursuit of excellence, the pursuit of excellence in your craft. Most people want the result of that commitment without being willing to live it. Think about the business owners or the people in this world who you genuinely admire, the ones that seem to operate at a completely different level, right? They don't have to even be business people. They could be artists. They could be athletes. It's well known that Steph Curry, who is known as the best shooter of all time in basketball, is absolutely obsessed about his shooting routine. He puts up something like close to 1,000 shots a day. There's a reason why there's a video out there where he hits 126 3-pointers in a row in practice, not missing a beat. It takes a different level of commitment. Great musicians, great artists. I mean, there's this great story of Michael Jackson where he wakes up in the middle of the night and calls his producer, who's Quincy Jones, and says, Quincy, we gotta go to the studio right now and record this record that just hit me in the head right now. It's in my mind. I gotta get it on tape. I gotta get it on vinyl. And Quincy's like, "Can't this wait till the morning? It's 2 o'clock in the morning." He's like, "No, if I don't take action right now, God is going to give this idea to Prince." It sounds insane, but it takes that level of commitment to go after what you want. I want to be honest with you. There are very few moments in the day where I'm genuinely switched off and not building, not thinking about business, not thinking about how we can grow, not thinking about how we can provide more value in each episode. There's not a meal that Nicole and I sit down on and not talk about work, not talk about business. We're obsessed. With what we do. Now, that's either inspiring or terrifying. It depends on where you are right now. Either reaction is probably correct. But the lesson I want to give you from this movie is that the people who built extraordinary things stop separating the craft from their life. The craft is their life. Total commitment is not a strategy. It's actually an identity. If this episode is hitting you a little bit differently, subscribe to the show. I have an upcoming episode that dives into the question: Are successful people just lucky? How much does luck actually influence your success? I'm doing the research and the pre-production for this episode right now. I can't wait to release it. So hit subscribe so you don't miss it when it comes out. Two more movies and the best two are still to come. Movie number 4, The Founder. And this one's a tough one.
Okay.
Really, the theme of this movie is about execution and that execution beats ideas every single time. Now, if you're not familiar with this movie, it's basically the story of McDonald's, the fast food chain. Fair warning, the main character of this movie is Ray Kroc. He's a very controversial figure. Now, I'm not here to tell you that he was a horrible person. I'm not here to tell you that he was a good person. That's for you to decide. I am here to tell you that he was an extraordinary executor. He executed brilliantly. On all three things can be true. He could be good, he could be bad, he could be extraordinary at executing. In 1954, Ray Kroc is a 52-year-old milkshake machine salesman selling milkshake machines at 52. No business experience other than selling these machines. He stumbles comes across a hamburger stand in San Bernardino, California, and he runs into the two brothers, Dick and Mac McDonald. What they built in that location was revolutionary. It was fast food, it was consistent quality, it was unbelievable efficiency. Kroc sees not a restaurant but a system, not a business but an empire. He sees the vision that the brothers just don't see. And the McDonald brothers see a comfortable little operation that they're happy with. They don't see this massive business that he sees as the future of McDonald's. Let's play a particular clip from this movie I want to show you. Let's go.
Persistence. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent won't. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius won't. Unrewarded genius is practically a cliché. Education won't. The world is full of educated fools. Persistence and determination alone are all-powerful.
Again, this scene is almost like a throwaway scene. People don't even notice this scene sometimes. He's a 52-year-old man driving alone at night, and he's failed at everything in life up to this point, but he's still going. He's still believing. He's still preparing for a moment that is yet to come. And here is what makes this scene uncomfortable. You know what's coming. You know that the persistence is about to pay off, and you also know what he's about to do with that payoff. He takes the McDonald brothers' idea and their system and their name and their entire life's work, and he makes it his. He's obsessed with making this thing the biggest business ever. He equates it to the Catholic Church, like there's a church on every corner. There's a McDonald's on every corner, right? It's kind of true if you think about it. And he does this not through invention. He does this through execution, through relentlessness, through unstoppable will. If you watch the film, he's not that creative, but he is going to fight for the opportunity and the vision he sees in front of him, and he sacrifices everything for it. I want you to hold two things at once. First, ideas are worth almost nothing without execution. The McDonald brothers had a dinky little restaurant, one or two locations, Ray Kroc had a vision to take their system and their restaurant and make it into a global empire. His execution beat their execution. The graveyard of entrepreneurship is full of brilliant ideas that weren't executed properly. So that's the first thing I want you to hold in your mind. Second, how you execute matters. What Kroc eventually did to the brothers and the story that's told is pretty sad. You know, if you haven't watched the movie, I don't want to ruin it for you, but he doesn't turn out to look like such a great guy. At the end of the day, his legacy is tarnished. And yeah, he built this crazy, crazy business, but he could have done it by being a better person.
OK?
He didn't have to be so nasty and execution didn't have to be so ruthless. But you can't help but admire his persistence. And that's the lesson here. Sometimes you're going to have to really persist to go after what you want. But yet in that persistence, you got to be careful about the damage you're going to make. Along the way. You don't want too much collateral damage because your reputation matters. Be persistent, but not at the cost of your reputation. Movie number 5: Whiplash. And the theme of this movie, if you've watched it before and maybe you missed the theme, but is that your standard is your ceiling. Whatever standard you hold yourself to is really your potential. Now, I saved this movie for last because it's the most uncomfortable one out of all of them. But it's the most important one. Andrew Nieman is a young jazz drummer at the most elite music school in the country. His instructor, Terence Fletcher, who's played by J.K. Simmons, who's one of the most brilliant performers in cinema, he is an absolute monster. Okay? He's a psychologically abusive person who's really just a jerk. He throws chairs around, destroys people's emotional state in a second, all in the name of one belief: the difference between good and great is not talent, but the standard you hold yourself to. He believes that you need to hold yourself to a higher standard if you want to be great. Now, I'm not endorsing Fletcher's methods here, but the one question at heart here of the film is one that you really need to think about. It's one of the most important questions you'll ever ask yourself. Are you actually doing your best or are you doing what's comfortable and calling it your best? Big difference. Let's jump into a specific clip from this movie right now. Watch Andrew's face in that moment when he's playing. He's not playing for the audience. He's not playing for Fletcher. He's not playing for revenge. He's not trying to prove anything. He's playing for the standard he put for himself. His standard. The one that exists whether there's somebody watching or not. Whether somebody likes it or not. Whether or not it costs him everything. He doesn't care. He wants to play to the standard he believes is excellent. I mean, that moment wrecked me the first time I watched it because I've been in that moment, not on stage, but in my makeshift walk-in closet recording booth when nobody was listening and building the podcast, recording those first few episodes when we had no audience. There was really no reason for me to keep trying and recording to get those first few episodes right, other than believing in what we were building. The entrepreneurs that I found that build something that lasts are not the ones with the best resources. They're not the ones that are brilliant or smart or charismatic or have the best timing or any of that. They're the ones that hold a standard that's completely independent of external validation. They don't really care what people think. They're doing it for themselves to prove something to themselves that they can build something incredible. They do the work at a level that deserves to be done, where they can go to bed and say, "I did something exceptional today. I'm better today than I was yesterday." And that compounds because most businesses operate at the level of what's expected. They do the bare minimum. They operate at a level that what's possible. No, what's possible is always further than you expect. You need to push the boundaries beyond what you believe is possible. And the lesson that I want you to extract from this movie, from this scene, is that most entrepreneurs are at 70% of what they call their best. There are so many levels you can go beyond that. OK? You can do better. And you've got to hold yourself to that standard because nobody else is going to hold you to the standard. There's no boss and there's nobody's going to put push you. There's nobody that's gonna scream in your face and say you could do better. Do the work at the level it deserves, not the level that feels comfortable or good enough. So 5 movies, 5 moments, 5 lessons. When it comes to Moneyball, see what the market's missing before everyone does and go after it. Cast Away, build with whatever you have right now. The Prestige, oh, I love that film. Make your craft, what you do, and your life Inseparable. There's no difference. It is your life. The Founder: Execute, but be careful. Protect the people around you. Do it with respect. And finally, Whiplash: Hold the standard that needs no audience. You are the audience. You're doing it so that you could prove to yourself that there are levels to this game. Pick one of these films this weekend. Watch it as a business owner and not a viewer. Not just to be entertained. It's entertaining for sure, but find the moment I just told you about. Pause it. Ask yourself, where is this hitting me? How does this affect my business right now? I promise you, you're going to see it differently and you're going to get more out of it than just a great movie night. If this episode resonated with you, if you want more practical business lessons, then I highly recommend you check out an episode we recently published called The 5 Silent Killers of Success. These are the 5 things I found in my 20 years of business experience that kill any level of success and what to do about it. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically, and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.
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