This year for my wife and I it’s been fairly traumatic because we have had to handle her breast cancer and our elder two daughter’s weddings – my wife made the dresses while undergoing treatment. We used to watch the evening news at about 10 o’clock at night before going to bed but realized that actually the negative content of the news as reported quite often resulted in us not sleeping well. On Seth Godin’s blog this week he made a very interesting statement about news reporting and content. If we continue to allow the media to dictate our thinking then we end up believing, very often, that the sky is falling in. In reality the sky isn’t falling in. Yes there are bad things happening all over the world but that’s always been the case it’s just that we’ve become much better at global communication and in particular finding bad news. So what is the answer? Find some good news.
We voted with our feet and switched off the television. We actually kept it on and watched numerous episodes of scrubs, highly entertaining and subsequently would actually sleep at night. The world doesn’t stop because we didn’t watch the news and we learnt become much more selective about what we watch and won’t be listened to.
This video is unashamedly promoting a networking company but it is a hugely inspiring clip and one well worth watching. If you are interested then whatever you do please don’t contact them direct – contact me I’ll show you how to work with these products but not in the traditional MLM way.
Every once in a while there is a film that comes along and changes perceptions and lives. The film I’d like to talk about today is Freedom Writers by Erin Gruwell and the motion picture by Paramount.
The best films are ones where real stories are played out and this is a real story of triumph over unimaginable odds. Erin Gruwell, played by Hilary Swank, is a newly qualified secondary school teacher who gets a job in Wilson High School, Long Beach, California. She is an idealistic (i can identify with that) young teacher presented with the dregs of the school system who have been written off by the school and the local education board.
One day she intercepts a note from one of the students that pokes fun at a guy with big nose and that leads onto a passionate and often heated debate about how and why the holocaust happened and that in turn leads to the diary of Anne Frank and what started out as a hopeless class turns into a civil rights movement that is still active today – 10 years later.
For those emotionally secure people, such as myself, I found it hard to keep my emotionally secured feelings emotionally secured whilst watching this film. It was edited fantastically, shot brilliantly, acted amazingly and worked together to form a perfect whole.
There is, of course, the fact that it is an all too common issue, one which we see all too much of, to little effect. There is also the fact that the same old shootings and naive do-gooders make their respective appearances, however, the primary synopsis of the teacher trying to make herself understood, to a class trying to make themselves understood goes hand-in-hand for a movie that crescendoes and breaks the emotional barriers of the most secure people.
My friend cries at nothing. My friend sobbed in the cinema.
Watch it. Alone. Absorb. Then buy the book!
This year for my wife and I it’s been fairly traumatic because we have had to handle her breast cancer and our elder two daughter’s weddings – my wife made the dresses while undergoing treatment. We used to watch the evening news at about 10 o’clock at night before going to bed but realized that actually the negative content of the news as reported quite often resulted in us not sleeping well. On Seth Godin’s blog this week he made a very interesting statement about news reporting and content. If we continue to allow the media to dictate our thinking then we end up believing, very often, that the sky is falling in. In reality the sky isn’t falling in. Yes there are bad things happening all over the world but that’s always been the case it’s just that we’ve become much better at global communication and in particular finding bad news. So what is the answer? Find some good news.
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