This story is about an elderly, Italian man, Victor Rone. I met Victor when I was in high school. Victor is the step-father of one of my closest friends, Jared. Victor, Jared, and Jared’s Mom lived together in my hometown of Vineland, New Jersey. Victor was no ordinary man, and I knew that from the moment I met him. I knew of Victor for years because he was a close friend of a family friend who passed away when I was 8th Grade, but I finally met him when I was 16. The first thing I noticed about Victor was his presence. Victor is a reserved man, but I knew he was studying me from the moment I met him, much like he does with all people as I came to realize over time.
So who is Victor Rone? Victor is a successful business man and investor. Victor is a passionate man with what means most him in life: his family, his boat, his Mercedes, and his love for hunting. Victor can be a misunderstood person, leading some to think he is a stubborn and selfish man, but that is the furthest from the truth. His dialogue is never sugar coated, he tells you how it is, a quality I learned over time is rare in this world. He is real and genuine to say the least.
Interaction with Victor was limited in high school because I still feared him, but just as he was studying me, I was reciprocating this attentive behavior. That fear soon changed to respect, and eventually humor because we all loved to pick at the nerves of Jeanie, Jared’s Mother. Jared’s mother made the best sweet tea I have had to this day and was a great cook. Victor would give Jeanie hell about her cooking, and she would give it right back. I enjoyed her sweet tea so much that Victor would eventually put me on a quota for how many glasses I could have in an evening.
After college, the interactions between Victor and I became longer and the subjects became deeper. Victor always encouraged me in every avenue that interested me. It was at this point that our small talk and brief encounters turn into our sit downs. Whether it be after dinner or just fate that brought us to the dinner table, but many lessons that I will take with me for the rest of my life were taught at that table. From money management and investing to life, philosophy, and ideas, Victor instilled lesson after lesson to me over the course of my young adult life. The knowledge and experience that a successful yet reserved 80 year old man can bestow on you if you take the time to listen is priceless. I was a sponge to the puddle of abundant wisdom that came flowing from the mind to the lips of Victor Rone.
Victor’s success in business is not one of luck, but one of hard work, dedication, and due diligence. If you arrive at his residence during the early evening hours, chances are you will find him studying the stock prices on the bottom of the tv screen, as the voices of news anchors and stock analysts echo in the background. My sit downs with Victor were predominantly about business, investment advice, and the truth of big business and the stock market in the bigger picture. I remember sitting down at the dining room table around asking Victor for advice in the stock market. Victor always told me to hold my faith in longevity. His advice still reverberates in my mind to this day.
“Look for the stock that yields the best dividends, know your limits, and don’t be greedy,” he would say. I am a millionaire many times over, not because I am greedy, but I know when to get in and I know when to get out. “Don’t wait for the stock to peak, know that what goes up must come down. When your greed becomes too much, is when you will lose it all. He taught me that you can’t be afraid to take risks. I can still picture his facial expressions when he talks about the money he’s lost, even after all the success he has had in the market. He taught me about the 1%, and how they control the market over the long term. He spoke of the stupidity of man in getting into a market on a bull run, investing in the market when its on the up and up, yet losing it all when it comes tumbling down and the average person succumbs to their hopes of getting rich only to watch it fall because they don’t know when to get out. He taught me how the 1% controls the rise and fall of the market, crashing the market only after they have sold out, and sit and wait for it to bottom out while the average person loses most of what they have invested. As an older man, he’s seen the rise and fall of the market many times over, and indicated to me that those with extreme wealth will wait for the market to bottom out, and buy back in knowing that they will make a small fortune once they buy back in at the bottom of the market and continually buy back in and repeat the cycle throughout the course of their life giving rise to the huge crashes we’ve seen in the last century. He told me this was the greatest advice he could give me, for it took him most of his life to learn the reality of this paradigm.
He taught me not to put much faith and admiration in the lives and fortunes of people like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. He told me any man of this planet who has amassed fortunes exceeding billions of dollars has not done so without lying, stealing, cheating and doing whatever was necessary to make their way to the top. He taught me that greed with lead you to some of the cruelest things, but to put faith in knowing your limits and not letting your greed get in the way of your honesty and integrity.
Along with business, we discussed ideas. At the kitchen table we’d come together while Jared played video games. We’d sit, sometimes for hours, going back and forth on ideas of the present and future. Jeanie always told me Victor was a dreamer, much like myself. Behind those blue eyes, was a mind churning with ideas, but mostly we discussed his thoughts on energy as I grew older Over time, I told Victor about my ambition to create a generator, and so we’d sit and engage in dialogue while bringing our ideas to paper as we passed pen and paper back and forth drawing out our ideas of power generation that we thought about. Victor always gave me the time of day to unravel the ideas held within my mind, and would give me feedback regardless if it was what I wanted to hear or not. Even after I moved away, he and Jeanie would still ask about my progress on my dream of creating a generator.
The sit down I remember the most, was a late afternoon with Victor, Jared, his neighbor, and I sitting at the dining room table once more. This sit down was concerned with the origins of the universe, although this time it was not Victor that got me thinking, but his neighbor, Mr. Borek, who set my mind on a mission with the words he professed. Mr. Borek is a man I have known for years, dating back to my middle school baseball days when I played baseball with his son. I don’t remember how the story began, but I know how it ended. Mr. Borek told me to think about this:
“The universe began with a thought and was created from such.”
This idea has led me down a rabbit hole that I spend much time contemplating over even until this very day. Everything we know is manifested and created from our thoughts as conscious beings, and so it only makes sense that the created had to have come from such a process. God thought, therefore created everything is the idea that consumes my mind. To understand the mind of the Creator, will help understand all that is and all that there ever will be.
These sit-downs with Victor shaped the way I see the world. What began as quiet dinners at a kitchen table slowly became lessons that carried me from being a curious teenage boy into the man I am still becoming. Victor taught me how to think about money, discipline, and the realities of the world. But he also taught me something far more valuable—the importance of thinking for myself. I still think about those afternoons at the dining room table. The television humming in the background with stock prices crawling across the screen, a glass of Jeanie’s sweet tea in my hand, and Victor sitting across from me studying the world the same way he studied the market. And sometimes my mind drifts back to what Mr. Borek said that day: “The universe began with a thought.” Maybe that is why those conversations mattered so much. They were more than discussions about business or ideas. They were moments where thoughts were shared, challenged, and created—small sparks of understanding passed from one mind to another.
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