Something to Keep
“Every man at some point in his life is gonna lose a battle. He’s gonna fight and he’s gonna lose. But what makes him a man, is that in the midst of that battle he does not lose himself.”
Eric Taylor
A Second Look
I often think about a variation of the quote above (which came from a TV show called Friday Night Lights, more on this later). How do you deal with the inevitable setback? There’s this delusion in the world of self-development where we’re supposed to believe that we can do anything we set our mind to. Well, what happens when you fail and need to move on?
An important part of becoming someone with integrity isn’t failing, but dealing with it in a mature way: accepting one’s emotions, practicing self-compassion, learning from one’s experiences, and so on. I read this quote somewhere that said that success is a series of small wins. It can be, but more often than not, it’s also a series of failures. The most important lessons in life you learn when you fail, not when everything goes according to plan.
Something I Liked
Ever since I started reading and writing about self-development, it seems as if I have forgotten about the importance of media. At some point, I decided to go back to watching movies and TV shows and realized that there are numerous advantages to consuming media. I explored all that in an essay if you’re interested, but the gist of it is that media helps us connect with each other.
Which brings me to Friday Night Lights, a drama from the late 00s that follows the fictional Dillon Panthers, a high school football team in Texas. I could go on and on about the show, but I’ll just say it’s one of the best-written dramas ever. One of the things that makes FNL so unique is that it has strong masculine characters that are not cliches. I recently read an article on The Art of Manliness about this very topic.
The article compiles a series of lessons from the show that relate to the ideas from my essay. Watching television isn’t always a waste of time; it’s how we make sense of the world around us and how we develop empathy for the characters we care about. I highly recommend FNL, but even if you never watch it, you probably have a favorite show that makes you feel part of something bigger. Don’t make the same mistake I did and see that as a waste of time. You can learn more than you think by watching a silly television show.