A few days ago, Unbroken became another of the few movies that I would enthusiastically watch more than once.
It’s the story of Louie Zamperini, who was a US Olympian who later became a bombardier in World War II. And while searching for a missing B-24 over open water, several hundreds miles from Oahu, Hawaii, his plane suffered severe mechanical failures and crashed into the sea.
Of the 11 crew members, only three survived, and Louie was one of them.
But they were stranded.
As far as the eye could see, there was nothing…. but ocean.
They only had a few chocolate bars (which didn’t last one night), a few half-pints of water, a flare gun, sea dye, fishhooks, and a fishing line.
Imagine that.
No food. Little water. And no hope of rescue.
Many would give up.
And in fact, one of them started panicking right away. Another had a significant head injury.
Louie realized that he had to be one to keep the morale high, and he started telling stories of how great it would be back home, with their families, slowly savoring warm home cooked meals.
It was a constant mental battle.
One day passed, two days, three days, and on…
All they had was hope.
It was so bad that they had to depend on rain to survive. And they lucked out when it came to food too.
One day, a bird landed on their raft, and they were able to catch it and kill it. They had no way to cook it though and the flesh was just rancid. It made them all throw up, but they were able to use it as a bait to catch a fish.
They kept them going for a bit longer.
Thirty days in though, they lost one to starvation and dehydration.
The grim reaper was hovering over their shoulders. But they still had believe and endure their own slow, painful demise.
And then they were “rescued”.
But enough on that.
This wasn’t some random story.
There’s a reason I shared it.
Throughout the movie, there was a maxim that Louie repeated more than once. It’s something that his brother told him when he was a young buck, and it served to inflame his desire to live even at his lowest points.
It was simply:
“If you can take it, you can make it.”
It calls to mind that great speech in another movie I like a lot, when Rocky Balboa told his son that it’s not about how hard you can hit but how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.
Louie could have said fugk it after 40 days of feeling his life ebb away with no hope of survival, but he chose to desperately cling to life until the very last moment.
And while the stakes are much, much lower on the mat, that’s same kind of determination I want for myself.
It doesn’t matter if I’m down by 30 going into the last minute.
It doesn’t matter if I got taken down and passed in the first minute.
And it doesn’t matter if everyone expects me to lose to the guy standing across from me.
For every moment, every second, and every minute of the match, I can still win.
And that principle applies to far more than just competition (obviously).
Use it as you will.
On to some business (uh oh I spelled it right) stuff.
I’m still in Vegas, and later today, the Grand Prix will be going down. I’ll be live streaming some of the matches up on the book of faces, and the OLDMAN coupon will stay active until tomorrow.
Once it’s gone though, who knows if it will ever come back.
Just a word of advice though, it works on every last one of my courses, but while I’ve been out here, the one that I have gotten the absolute positive feedback on has been the “Half Guard Trickery” course.
It’s filled with more than just techniques. In fact, even if you think no one can touch your Half Guardian card, there is still something that you can learn about the little micro battles and positions that exist in the game.
Reach out and grasp desperately for half gyardian life here:
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