This week I went to see the movie “The Social Network”, which is a movie about the story behind Facebook.

I also watched the new remake of the movie “The Karate Kid”, which strangely enough has nothing to do with Karate and everything to do with Kung Fu.  I guess “The Kung Fu Kid” wouldn’t have done as well at the box office?

Anyway, I enjoyed watching both of these movies, but there is a potential hidden success killer in these movies that can affect our subconscious mind if we’re not aware of it.

The success killer I’m referring to is the movie montage.

Let’s start with The Social Network.

Essentially, the whole movie is a montage of the events which took Mark Zuckerberg through the process of creating, launching and ultimately making Facebook the multi-billion dollar company it is right now in less than a decade.

The story is very inspiring, especially to a techno-geek like me.  However, the challenge with watching a movie like this is that it compresses everything that happened into a one and a half hour series of events that take Facebook from the idea stage to being worth billions.

The success of Facebook was very fast, but it wasn’t that fast.  Meaning, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t go from the concept stage of creating Facebook to the point where venture capitalists are writing him a check for half a million dollars in 45 minutes, which is roughly how long it took in “movie time”.

Of course consciously we understand that there are passages of time in between the different scenes in the movie, especially since there are little labels at the bottom which tell you the month and year you are watching, but I’m talking about the subconscious level which just sees this young entrepreneur come up with an idea and BAM he’s programming away at his computer and BAM he’s finished writing the software and BAM it’s launched and thousands of people are using it and BAM he’s a billionaire.

Real life doesn’t work that way.  Real life isn’t a montage.  When the movie skips ahead six month with nothing happening, that’s a long period of time in real life!

I think there is a real danger in the subconscious programming that happens when we watch movies like this, because when we get an idea for something we unconsciously expect things to work out as quickly as they do in the movies.  Well that’s not going to happen.

The reason people like Mark Zuckerberg succeed is because they are fast to implement the ideas that come to them and they focus their energy and intention on their ideas.  As the movie illustrates, it’s not even that they are the first ones to come up with an idea, but they are the first ones to go through the process of implementing the idea.  And that process may take a long time.

Some place right now, someone has a new idea that will pale what Google and Facebook have done on the Internet.  However, that idea may never actually materialize into anything big because that person may give up way too easily.

Take a look at the new Karate Kid movie as well.  We all know the story.  Kid gets beat up by bullies.  Kid meets unlikely guru.  Guru teaches kid Kung Fu in a 30 minute montage.  Kid wins tournament vs kids who have been training in Kung Fu for years.

Now I’m not even talking about the fact that supposedly in the movie the kid learned Kung Fu in a matter of months (or was it even weeks?) by simply training with Jackie Chan every day, and ended up schooling kids who have been training probably since they were in their mother’s womb.  That in itself is far fetched, but I could possibly believe it if Jackie Chan is an awesome teacher and somehow all the other teachers in that tournament are so horrible that they can’t teach properly.

However, that is not what I’m referring to here.  I’m referring to the fact that when you start watching the movie, the kid doesn’t know Kung Fu.  An hour later he’s mastered the cobra stance.  You may not realize this, but that kind of thing programs your mind.  Subconsciously our minds start to think that it’s possible to master Kung Fu in one hour.

I know it sounds weird, but it’s true.

I’ve seen countless examples of this in my martial arts class.  One of the very first and most basic things that everyone learns on their first day is how to fall to the mat without hurting themselves and how to do rolls.  By rolls I mean something similar to the sommersaults we used to do in kindergarten.

What happens in almost every single case is that our Sensei demonstrates what the roll is supposed to look like, and there are other students there who go off and start doing rolls.  The brand new student who has never done a proper roll before makes his first attempt at doing rolls.  After about four or five tries, they almost all say the same thing “I guess I’m not good at these“.

It’s so funny, because it almost always happens.  Those that aren’t saying it are thinking it.  The reason for this is because they are comparing their mostly pathetic attempt to roll properly with the smooth, effortless roll our Sensei demonstrates.  The difference being that the new student has practiced a grand total of five rolls, and our Sensei has done them about a billion times!

It could very well be that a brand new student may be twenty times more athletic and more co-ordinated than a senior student, but their rolls suck because they haven’t had enough practice.  Period.

The age of TV has brought us the ability to see the world without leaving our living room.  It has brought us movies which demonstrate the wonders of the world to us.  But we have to be careful as to how we allow TV and now the Internet to program our subconscious minds.  Nobody can master a skill as quickly as the actors do in a movie montage.

I’ve done it.  We’ve all done it.  We’ve all given up on ideas that we were inspired and excited about because they didn’t immediately take off and produce immediate huge results.

Nobody puts on 25lbs of muscle and becomes a world-class boxer in the time it takes to watch a Rocky montage.

Nobody learns Kung Fu and wins a tournament in the time it takes to watch the Karate Kid montage.

Nobody comes up with an idea and builds a multi-billion dollar corporation in the time it takes to watch The Social Network.

Just something to think about the next time you try your hand at doing something, and you haven’t seen a world champion trophy or a billion dollars in one hour.

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