You’ll never catch me at a COMIC-CON convention … 

But sci-fi and fantasy movies are some of the most powerful mythology we have today (call this sad if you will).  While we enjoy them as escapist entertainment, remember that they are the products of the work of hundreds of brilliant people in probably the most competitive industry in the world.

And also considering that the creators of these movies have based their stories on timeless narratives coming from some of the world’s best thinkers, there’s a lot you can learn from them.

If the FITNESS BUSINESS is your “game worth playing” (see THE UGNL), then many of these lessons will apply to you. Just like the characters in these movies, we’re each on our own hero’s journey.  And I’ll say it again: I can’t imagine another career that allows you to become an entrepreneur and grow yourself, your personal skills, and your business skills, better and faster than personal training.

Nothing I’m going to share with you in this post is all that earth shattering, or something that you probably didn’t already observe yourself.  I just want to send out a reminder that the messages in these films are more credible than we tend to think or give them credit for.

So without further ado, here are a few valuable lessons from some of the biggest sci-fi/fantasy movies of all time.  These particular lessons have been meaningful to me mostly because I’ve made every one of these mistakes.  Let me know if you can relate to any of them, and the next time you watch, pay attention for the messages that apply to you.

STAR WARS EPISODE THREE

Thinking youre hot shit can seriously get you in trouble.

Thinking you're hot shit can seriously get you in trouble.

I sometimes get upset when I think of the hungry children that could have been fed with the budgets of STAR WARS I and II.  But I consider the third one to be a masterpiece.

While it was full of many messages, there was dominant one that summed up the whole movie:

If you act out of fear, you will bring precisely the things you fear into reality.

This goes for family, relationships, and career.  Anakin destroyed all of them, ironically enough, because of his fear of their destruction.

Furthermore, this fear opened him up to being misguided by an  unscrupulous leader.  Unlike Yoda, who asked him to clear his mind, look into himself, and not make his decisions emotionally, Palpatine used his fears against him as a leverage point to manipulate him.  He knew exactly which buttons to press.  Keep this in mind yourself when choosing who to follow, the type of leader you become, and how to use your own “powers”.

LORD OF THE RINGS, RETURN OF THE KING

Theres a little gollum in all of us.

There's a little bit of Gollum in all of us.


The precious – the metaphor is deep and symbolizes the greed for anything that consumes us.  In the movie, no one was consumed more than the monster Gollum.

He cut off all and everything – turned his back on the world – in the worship of his precious.  This caused his devolution into a grotesque being.  If you have someone close to you that has been consumed by their work (and you even see this in overzealous entrepreneurs), then you know the phenomenon.

By destroying the precious, man was finally able to become king again (there’s a lesson there somewhere).

AVATAR

Machines versus flesh and blood.

Machines versus flesh and blood.

There’s new big movie to add to the list of classics, Avatar.   Although on second viewing you do become a little bored by the basic plot, you can’t ignore the beauty of it, and can’t help taking the message to heart.  No matter how advanced we get technologically, nothing beats our own, natural “broadband”.

This goes for how you connect with people, all the way to how you market your business. Technology is a medium, it’s not a message.


For those of you that found this post off-topic, don’t worry, we’ll be back to talking about money and self centered sleezyiness in the next post.  Some of that is neccesary, especially when you look at the general earnings numbers and working situation of many smart and focused trainers today.

But the overarching paradigms of success are more important than any particular tactic, so try to get your lessons anywhere you can find them.  All three of these movies have the journey of the hero in common.  And if you’ve stepped out on this road to be an independent trainer, believe me, your journey will be just as perilous as anything Frodo Baggins went through.

Ha!  Didn’t think that there was so much to learn from the movies, huh?  Now if we could only figure out a way to make those tickets a right off …