5 Movies with awesome lessons about following dreams

fightclub

1. Fight Club - Get some certainty.

Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, holds a gun to the head of a convenience store assistant while asking “WHAT DID YOU WANT TO BE?”. Pitt’s character is obviously using a violent threat, but in an unusually encouraging way. He wants the assistant to follow his dreams so much so that he threatens to kill him for not following through. When the assistant eventually answers that he’d like to a “veterinarian”, but that there’s “too much schooling”, Pitt’s character gives him an ultimatum to follow his dreams... not the typical example of encouragement. This scene shows us that the convenience store assistant no longer had any uncertainty about what he was going to do - he was going to follow his dream of becoming a vet and truly live, or he was going to die. 

If you’re not on your way to becoming a veterinarian in 6 weeks, you will be dead.

2. The Beach - Leave the comfort zone.

"Never refuse an invitation, never resist the unfamiliar, never fail to be polite and never outstay the welcome. Just keep your mind open and suck in the experience. And if it hurts, you know what? It's probably worth it."

3. The Pursuit of Happyness - Listen to the right people.

happyness

4. Up in the air - If your dreams aren't for sale, don't sell them. 

air

Ryan BinghamThen you got out of college and started working here. How much did they pay you to give up on your dreams? 

Bob: Twenty seven thousand a year. 

Ryan Bingham:

 "At what point were you going to stop and go back to what made you happy?"

5. The Shaw Shank Redemption - Always persevere, but detach from the result.

'Red', Morgan Freeman's character, is continuously trying so hard to impress the parole board throughout the movie but it never seems to work. However, once he detaches himself from the result - he gets released! Once we give up our attachment to the result that we're looking for, this will free us to follow it even more. It may sound abstract but when we boil it down and think about it, how many times have we quit doing something without seeing it through because we didn’t get the outcomes that we were looking for? Or how many times have you had someone trying to sell you something too much? It doesn’t seem like a good deal because they’re trying too hard and selling too hard. They are attached to the result and it turns us away. 

Rehabilitated? It’s just a bullshit word. So you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don’t give a shit.