Unbreakable

Unbreakable

When I teach pick up, I prefer to do it over months.  This allows me time to get to know the student and really get in their heads and know everything I can.  The additional time also allows me to use some unorthodox tactics in teaching people.  One of the things I do is make the students watch particular movies and tell me what the pickup lesson was to the movie.  I never tell people what they are supposed to be looking for or learning, I make them tell me after the fact.  Often they don’t get the point, unless the point is a hardcore sticking point for them and smacking them in the face.

One of the movies that I use is the M. Night Shyamalan movie “Unbreakable”.  Most people consider his pinnacle of work to be “The Sixth Sense”.  I respectfully disagree.  The movie opens with David Dunn (played by Bruce Willis) who has extraordinary abilities that he is unaware of, and is living a very mundane life.  His life is in shambles:  His kid doesn’t respect him, his wife and he are on the rocks, and he is in a dead end job.  At one point, David describes his empty life as “waking up every morning with a great sadness.”

Elijah Price (played by Samuel L. Jackson) believes that he has found the purpose of David.  He was meant to save other people as a super hero.  David is of course initially resistant and unbelieving in his own abilities (ie. Shitty Inner Game).  Elijah spends most of the moving getting David to believe in himself and to realize his purpose.  When David finally does accept his path and begins doing what he was meant to do, his life becomes much better.  When asked about his sadness in the mornings, he says that it has gone.

There are a lot of movies that show a character going through changes and discovering their purposes.  This one for me is so powerful because it describes EXACTLY how I used to feel when I was married and working in a chemical plant.  Every morning I woke up miserable.  I hated my job and everything about it.  Every day was a struggle to go to work.  In the beginning this sadness just came in a small dose of longing for something else that I was never able to describe.  Eventually toward the end I had to talk myself every day out of calling into work sick or taking a vacation day.  The one thing that made me continue on was my love for my then wife.  Oh I hid it well, but inside but inside I was dying.

Then something happened that changed everything: I got laid off.  Like most people, at the time I defined myself by what I did for a living.  It was who I was and I considered it my purpose.  The problem was, it really wasn’t my purpose and I hated it (and by proxy my life).  When the employees were told of the layoffs, I was mired in self pity for a brief time.  Eventually one of the employees told me while I was whoa is me-ing “Go be a teacher.  You come in here every day telling us useless shit that none of us here care about.  Go tell some kids.  They probably won’t care either, but at least they will take notes.”  Initially I felt insulted.  I often felt out of place at work, but I didn’t like it being thrown in my face.  The fact was I was very out of place.  I was not content just to go to work and survive and be contained in a little bubble.  My soul wanted more.  My co-workers were different.

I took my co-worker’s advice and did indeed become a teacher (although I needed far more than just his advice to actually do that.  I’ll tell those stories another time though).  Once I was on the path to being a teacher an interesting thing happened:  No more morning sadness.  Because I found my purpose, like David Dunn, I am unbreakable.  You can be as well when you find your place in the world.  Before even attempting to find a woman, you should first find yourself.

—-Knack

Tagged as: Arts, game, inner game, Knack, pick-up, Unbreakable, Venusian, woman