Treat Your Life Like a Movie and Yourself Like the Hero
You’ll be more present, positive, and patient
“If you treat the world as a movie of your life, and you treat yourself as the hero of that movie, it makes the world a much more pleasant place to deal with.”
In an interview with Tim Ferriss, Naval Ravikant mentions the book Illusions by Richard Bach. In the autobiographical novel, a messiah-like character teaches Bach about the many illusions humans create and fall for as part of their everyday reality. At one point, the duo goes to see a movie and ends up discussing films as a metaphor for life:
“You can hold a reel of film in your hands,” he said, “and it’s all finished and complete — beginning, middle, end are all there that same second. The film exists beyond the time that it records, and if you know what the movie is, you know generally what’s going to happen. But in order to get caught up and swept away in it, you have to put it in a projector and let it go through the lens minute by minute… any illusion requires space and time to be experienced.”
The idea here is that, whether you believe in free will or not, whether you know where it’s going or not, the only way to truly experience your life is to live it one minute at a time.
