Life Isn’t a Bed of Roses
When someone is a movie lover, they might be wasting time. Maybe they’re wasting their life living someone else’s dream through stories and imagination. Honestly, which guy has never imagined himself as an action hero, or which woman has never seen herself as a beautiful princess in a fairy tale? We lose ourselves, get inspired by our heroes, and live an amazing life.
But the truth is – it’s not our life. It’s a borrowed life. One day, however, something happens. One day we wake up. We realize we are not action heroes. We realize there are no fairy-tale princes coming to take us away on a white horse.
Reality hits us, and life grinds us down. Our dreams collapse like a house of cards. We have no way to change it. No way to live the life we want, no money, no right people around us, no chance for a better job. Instead, life feels hard – sometimes brutally hard…
What now?
I just watched a short video on YouTube from the movie Rocky Balboa, and it reminded me of two things:
- The message in this video is incredibly inspiring and deeply encouraging.
- It brought back the story of Sylvester Stallone before he became famous. Before he was one of the best-known actors of our time, rising again from the ashes to show us that life is truly what we make it.
For Stallone, his own life wrote the role of Rocky. He wanted to act – always had – but had no opportunity. Agent after agent rejected him. He went from studio to studio, each one telling him to give up. He was turned down perhaps a thousand times.
It got so bad that his marriage nearly ended. To survive while writing the script for the first Rocky film, he had to sell family jewelry – something his wife did not appreciate. And it got even worse. He was so broke that he ended up selling his dog just to have some money.
His best friend…
When the script was finished, producers loved it. But they told him they’d only pay him big money if he agreed not to play the lead role. He refused. He wanted to act. In the end, instead of hundreds of thousands for the script, he sold it to a studio for $30,000.
The first thing he did was run back to find the man he had sold his dog to. When he finally found him outside the same store, the man refused to sell the dog back.
Eventually, Stallone got his dog back – but only after paying $15,000 and agreeing to let the man appear in the film.
I believe that man ended up playing the referee in the final fight.
Then came the breakthrough: Rocky stormed the box office and became one of the most successful films of all time. Stallone’s star began to rise.
Do you think any of this would have been possible if Stallone hadn’t lived by the very same message he delivers to his son in that unforgettable scene?