How you

Hey, have you seen coco? The animation movie. Even if you aren’t a big fan of animation I strongly recommend that you see that movie. It was awesome and it’s an heart warming story. I want to share some of the lessons I learnt from the movie with you.

Coco is basically the story of a boy who is a part of a loving family, who do everything else part from music, for some reason, they hate music and strongly forbid any of their family members from singing or any other musical activity but this young boy, Miguel couldn’t help himself, he actually wanted to be a musician which was like a big family taboo, in his journey to exploring music against the odds, he found himself at the land of the dead, where he meet his dead relatives, braved through a lot of challenges, risked his life and was later able to get his family’s blessing to be a musician and restored music to the family.

One of the things I learn from his pursuit of music is that he didn’t allow himself to be caged by stereotypes of what he could do and what he couldn’t do but he was ready to go against the norms and traditions.

A lot of times we often choose the path of least resistance because we don’t want to offend anyone or face any confrontation. So we just do what we are told to do n=and we silence what we are passionate about or what our heart is really telling us to do.

A lot of times we fail to answer questions, why can’t I do this? We just accept it because we don’t want to offend anyone.

The people that love us are sometimes afraid that we might fail and the sting of failure may hurt us really bad, so they try to shield us from failing. Failure might hurt but when we fail, we get back up again and we have learnt a way that doesn’t work.

 Sometimes people trying to protect us because they love us can lead us being shielded from our real self. I might prevent us from sharing the amazing gift that we have with the world.

Another thing I saw was that our lives cannot be based on the history of other people, what happened to some person in the past, in the movie, his family prevented him to music because they felt it might change him just the same way it changed his great grand father. Can you imagine? Hinging your life base on what happened to someone like 100 years ago.

That’s the past! Even if it happened last week, your life would not be determined by the determined by what happened in someone else’s live. It is okay that you learn from it.

I also realised that sometimes we allow ourselves to punished for the mistakes that other people made, the mistakes that our elder siblings, uncle, aunty, cousin etc. made. We allow our lives to be lived under that shadow.

The journey to finding our true selves would require courage at one point or the other. We must decide to be courageous, to follow our hearts and to challenge the norms whenever we have to. Don’t lock away your true self just to satisfy someone else’s wishes.

The other lesson I learnt from the movie was that in a bid to achieve our dreams, we must be willing to give it everything that it takes. However, some people take it too far. In the movie, one of the main characters who became the most famous musician of all time by killing his friend in order to be able to steal his songs since his friend was no longer interested in music.

In this journey to becoming successful, we must develop our values along the way, we don’t develop those values on the day in the eye of the storm, we must develop our values and the compromises that we can’t make. We definitely don’t have to cross lines to get it.