Well, I just got done watching the movie “Meet the Robinsons” with my kids. Grandma bought it for them this last weekend. I must say, I was really impressed with the movie. Not only was it an entertaining movie about family but it also had another message that really stuck out to me. They kept repeating that message through a single line in the movie. A message that I wish more people would get.
The message that stuck out to me in this movie is a simple concept but is very hard to put into practice. It is about not giving up and not getting down on yourself when you fail. The line that they kept repeating in the movie is “Keep moving forward”. In my mind, that was the best part about the movie. Keep moving forward is a great motto for life.
No one will go through life without experiencing some kind of failure. How you embrace that failure determines a lot about your future. If you take it as a failure and let it eat you up inside, it will lead you down a dark path and start to eat away at your self worth.
Lewis (the kid who is the main character) is a brilliant 12 year old kid and loves to invent things. Through the beginning of the movie, everything he invents seems to blow up and fall apart. He is also an orphan. He lives in an orphanage and is constantly meeting prospective parents. The number of interviews he has gets into the hundreds and he is pretty down on life. Each time he fails, he gets more and more discouraged until he finally just wants to give up.
This is what failure can do to you if you focus on it too much. I know because I have been in those shoes. I have wanted to give up so many times in the past and I still have a hard time accepting failure. Looking back on these failures though, I am thankful for going through them.
One of my favorite scenes in the movie illustrates how we should treat failure. Lewis is at dinner with the Robinsons. A contraption that they are using stops working so Lewis gets talked into trying to fix it (since he is a brilliant kid). He thinks he has it fixed but it explodes into a mess of peanut butter and jelly (you gotta watch the movie to see what that is all about). He gets down on himself and starts apologizing but the entire Robinson family starts cheering and they start celebrating his failure. This is where the line “Keep moving forward” really comes to life (although they say it a few times before this point). Mrs. Robinson also mentions that you don’t learn much from success, but you can learn a lot from failure.
That is so true with our life. If you can learn to embrace the failure for the learning experience that it is and nothing more, then you are going to make it a long ways in life. You are going to achieve some amazing things.
To conclude, here is a quote they show at the end of the movie and a good quote to live by.
“Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We
keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things…
and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
-Walt Disney