Happy Holidays Everyone – 12/25/2007

From all of us at The Forgotten Monk to all of you. Happy Holidays everyone. We’ll be back after the new year. Make it a good one!

The Lessons of Love I learned from ‘Stardust’

Yesterday one of my favorite movies is came out on DVD, Stardust. It was one of those films that didn’t get the press it deserved and wasn’t handled very well with its marketing.

They don’t make movies like this anymore; it had intrigue, love, humor, adventure, character growth, lots of heart and my one-day future ex-wife Claire Danes (sorry I haven’t call ya baby!) And I can’t wait to own it. (The DVD, cause no one owns Claire Danes!)

With it, there are a few lessons to be learned, most of them relationship ones. Now if you haven’t seen the movie, read no further, watch it, rent it, buy it! It’s worth it. But before you do, subscribe to www.theforgottenmonk.com and come back and read about what I learned from this movie I hold close to my heart. So, lets get to it and be warned spoilers ahead!

******Spoilers******

Our hero, Tristan is trying to win the love of Victoria (Sienna Miller) and after witnessing a falling star, promises to bring it to her to prove his love. One thing leads to another and he finds himself beyond the wall and in a mythical and magical world where he runs into the fallen Star, who, as it turns out is a woman named Yvaine (Claire Danes).

Tristan starts his journey dragging Yvaine along against her will, back to Victoria, to make good on his promise and win his hearts desire. Which leads me to what I wanted to get at, Tristan is a nice guy.

Tristan is a nice guy, with a big heart and a strong resolve. He starts his journey with one of the pitfalls of many a Nice Guy, the idea that he can change her mind by going out of his way to prove his love.

He spends a lot of his time so focused on winning Victoria over that he fails to notice his budding romance with Yvaine. He is so intent on his goal that he isn’t very nice to the lost and scared Yvaine and at one point he even tied her to a tree, in the middle of the forest… in the dead of night.

But there is hope for our hero, he grows up and he evolves as a person. He trades his obsessive one-sided relationship with the manipulative Victoria for a mutual and deep love with Yvaine. But how does one get there? How does a nice guy or gal come to accept that the way they conduct themselves isn’t winning the game? (For more on this, refer to our previous post ‘What Most Idiots Don’t Know about Fear of Failure or you can my article of the Nice Guy here)

A big part of it is that you have to stop thinking of relationships as your feelings towards another person, but rather what feelings are there between the two of you. Tristan and Yvaine grow closer as their adventure continues and they are a better fit with one another, whereas Tristan’s relationship with Victoria, as far as we know, has always been one-sided and she mostly plays with his emotions to get what she wants out of him.

The narrator will tell you that this is not a tale of a boy who becomes a man, but a tale of a man who finds his true love. But really, to win her love, he must first become a man. Tristan grows up, becomes more responsible, mature and sees the error of the way he had been conducting himself. Enough so, that he is willing to let go of who he wants for the love of the woman he needs.

When Tristan reached this point in his journey, even Victoria is taken aback at his transformation. He has the character traits that could have attracted her to him, but at this point she already lost her chance and he’s figured out that she isn’t the one for him.

Stardust has reinforced what I’ve grown to think about being a Nice Guy, many of his actions early on were exactly how I would conduct myself several years ago and his character growth leads him to be more the type of person who can attract and gain someone’s love.

Just remember my Nice Monks out there; sometimes there is a lot of growing up for you to do. You’re not a perfect person as much as you might think you are. And in many cases, you have to let go of who you want, in order to find who you need in your life.

Top Ten Things I Learned From ‘The X-Files’

Our main Monk Marvin has been busy this weekend. So Rick is here again and I took it upon myself to come up with a top 10 for the week. I had my 10 year reunion just a few weeks ago and I have been thinking of people who have come and gone in my life since those days and thought about Janette Meza, one of my closest friends in High School who had a thing for calling me Mulder and naturally I’d call her Scully. We were geeks and proud of it. And with that here are the top 10 things I learned from the X-Files.

1. Define which truth you’re looking for, the truth of what? The existence of Extraterrestrials? What happened to your sister? Does your stubbornly skeptical partner secretly have the hots for you?
2. The search for what you desire, takes sacrifice, friends and occasional feats of insubordination.
3. Occam’s razor’s ‘the simplest explanation is often the correct one’ is a good way to look at things, and sometimes Occam lacked imagination. Generally the most farfetched theory is the most correct.
4. Thinking outside of the box can get you places, like an abandoned satellite station in Mexico or a Submarine in the middle of the artic.
5. Trusting No One is a good rule, trusting everyone is an interesting way to go, finding a middle ground is your best bet.
6. In the pursuit of truth, there is a risk of losing your ideals and your way, confide in your friends and let them help you keep true to yourself.
7. Know when to cut your losses and get the hell out of dodge.
8. It helps to know people in high places; they can get out of trouble, such as, if you broke into a military base to catch a glimpse of an alien.
9. Sometimes it doesn’t take a safe with the most sophisticated security system to keep something secure from the wrong people. Sometimes all you need is an airport locker.
10. Secrets that have been buried away and forgotten often find ways to resurface. So take care of your crap before it take care of you.

That’s it Monks, if any of you Special Agents out there can come up with any more, leave a comment and let us know. Much like how, here at TheForgottenMonk, we try to find truth in Movies, Television and Books, Mulder tried to find his truth with a passionate search for Extraterrestrials and his missing sister. Whatever truth your looking for, the ‘Truth is out there’ and some of can even be found here from week to week.

Clip of the Week: Starbucks Customer Pays it Forward

Greensburg, Pennslyvania Starbucks. A woman pulls up to Starbucks drive thru and pays for her drink. Then she decides to buy a drink for the car behind her. He decides to do the same. A chain reaction occurred. It lasted two hours and consisted of more than a hundred cars.

And that’s my inspirational clip of the week. Have a great weekend guys.

What Most Idiots Don’t Know about Fear of Failure

“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain” – Various characters, Dune

I received a special email a few days ago. An acquaintance of mine is newly engaged. She dated the guy for a little over a year. It was happy news. “Wow a little over a year”, I thought to myself. My thoughts drifted to an old friend of mine.

Several years ago, Jack was pining for a woman he worked with. He managed to go out with her a couple times. But the relationship never flourished; to her credit, she was upfront with him and told him she wasn’t interested in him.

Regardless, Jack liked her a lot and he was determined to win her heart. Every time he’d do something to show her how she felt, she’d rebuff his advances. Months passed and Jack continued to be in the same place of frustration. He didn’t understand why she didn’t want him. Most importantly he couldn’t accept it. What made things harder for him, so he says, was every now and then he would see her. They worked for the same company. They were in different departments but every once in a while their professional lives would cross. Every time he saw her, he would tell me about it and his resolve would renew. Over time I realized he wasn’t going to get over her any time soon. We lost contact a little after that because I got a new contract at a different location.

Five years passed. Jack gave me a call. We met up for some drinks and dinner. It wasn’t long before he mentioned her again and how he had overheard from co-workers that she is dating someone else at work. He was severely depressed. I told him this was way long overdue, but it’s about time he moved on.

I remember thinking how sad it was, within the time he was pining for this girl, I had met someone, got engaged, got married and now I have a child on the way. If only he just threw in the towel and tried for someone else. And now my other friend, in just a little over a year she met someone and is now newly engaged. He could have easily have done the same thing four to five times over

It all comes down to one of the most over looked types of fear, the ‘Fear of Failure’.

What most believe think The Fear of Failure is.

Most people think that this kind of fear means not starting something because they think it’s going to fail. That’s only half of it.

It all comes down to an old saying, “Winners never quit and quitters never win”.
We are taught not to quit because by quitting we lose. My friend Jack just didn’t want to quit, his ego couldn’t take losing his objective. By giving up on winning her heart so that he can pursue someone else he could be in a happy relationship by now.

Sometimes, you have to quit.

I ran across another saying, that fits this best, “Winners never quit and quitters never win, but people who never quit and never win are idiots”

Don’t be an idiot.

Life Lessons from the Movie ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’

Hey Monks, this is Rick again. Marvin asked me to lend another helping hand. I just picked up Pirates 3, which lead us to write up a top 10 for the Pirates series. This is what we came up with. If you come up with any more, let us know.

1. Sometimes rules are just guidelines.
2. You can be a pirate and still be a good man or woman.
3. Every desire, gold, jewels or love… they all come at a price and sometimes a nifty voodoo curse.
4. You can’t run from whom you are. If you’re a pirate, you’re a pirate accept it.
5. Everyone can be a Captain of his or her very own Pirate ship and is a master of swordplay.
6. You have to know what you want to be able to get there.
7. If you make plans 10 years in advance, you better show up.
8. Leverage can go a long way.
9. Cannons can shoot out anything
10. When scrambling to escape from a life threatening situation, always remember to stop, smell the… wiff of rum in a flask just shot out of a cannon and take a swig.

Well. I hope you have a great weekend. The third movie wasn’t so good but I highly recommend the first one!

The Rocky Story Told By Tony Robbins

Sly Stallone makes up todays clip of the week. An amazing story of how he made Rocky a huge success.

Personally I would have went for the first offer. I think anyone would be crazy not to. But, I hope you enjoyed it anyhow, have a great weekend people?

Wives and Standards

For those of you who’ve wanted me to be more personal in my blog here’s your chance to get to know me and my life better. Well, my wife is pregnant with our first baby. And she’s experiencing some pubic pain. We are planning on getting Mother-to-be Maternity Support. My mind’s been going bonkers. Needless to say, she and my soon-to-be-born daughter are the loves of my life. I’ve been trying to keep myself available to her while at the same time, trying to find more ways to provide for them.

I haven’t been able to concentrate on the article I planned for today and I realize I need more material for it. So, I pulled it for today. The other reason I’m not publishing it is because I want to maintain a higher level of standard for my posts. The heart and soul of this blog is personal development, goals and success, let’s called ‘Monkish Posts’. Of course, I add featurettes, like my Top 10s, and Clip of the Week. But, I want to make sure I do a little more research and work on these Monkish posts. They won’t be perfect, but I really want my readers to get something out of it. I am actually coming up with a standard that my monkish posts must adhere to before publishing. I hope all of you notice and appreciate the difference and I hope the blog grows even more because of it.

Anyways, I need to tend to my beautiful wife. To whet your appetites my next monkish post will have something to do with fear. See you in my next post.

Top Ten Things I’ve Learned From Recent Video Games

Hello everyone.

I’m Leiandra from Zanderfin’s Wow “Casual” Raiding . I was a little hesitant when Marvin first asked me to post the top 10 things I’ve learned from World of Warcraft. I just couldn’t think of 10 things. So, I took the liberty of widening the category a bit and bring you.

Top Ten Things I’ve Learned From Recent Video Games

1. Playing Wow can give you the competitive edge over other candidates for a job. And it’s okay to put it on your resume.

2. Video games have evolved and relatively large, legacy game systems can now be held in the palm of your hand.

3. Some games get you to move.

4. Some games get you to groove.

5. And some even get you in the mood.

6. There are different games for all ages.

7. And some games encompass all ages.

8. Video games can help hand/eye coordination.

9. Some people spend way too much time playing video games.

10. There are girls that play video games on the Internet.

Announcements 12-3-2007

A three announcements today.

* First off a winners name was drawn, currently I am making efforts to contact the reader so they can claim their prize. Once I get contact I will announce their name here.

* At the beginning of November I started at 12 readers. As of December 1, 2007 I reached 32 readers. More than half way to my goal 50. I didn’t make 50, but that’s ok considering I more than doubled my readership. Once I reach a steady 60 I’ll put up the Feedburner chicklet.

* My blog was launched on Oct 15th as of December 1, 2007 I have had 500 page views. Not too bad. I wouldn’t mind breaking that 500 page views number on a daily basis. Hey I could always dream!