Intuition is often mixed up with the word instinct. They’re sort of the same thing, except instinct is more of an instant reaction that’s not based on knowledge or reasoning. Intuition, on the other hand, is of a feeling you get from previous knowledge that adds up to a certain moment or a special kind of awareness of what’s going on.

Instead of saying, “Yes” or “No,” it’s more like, “Yeah… maybe this will work out…” or “I… I don’t really know about this…” How do I know this? Well, I went through a very powerful experience in my life that taught me to trust my intuition through a series of “build-up” moments. This is how the story went.

One day during my freshman year of college, I was heading to discussion class and noticed an attractive girl on the side of the steps. As I walking up, she approached me with a bright smile. “Hi there,” she said, “Would you be interested in filling out a quick survey?”

I told her I was kind of in a hurry to class, but filled it out anyway. As I was filling it out, she talked to me about what I liked about college, what I wanted to do in the future, and if I was interested in doing business. I told her that I still didn’t know what I wanted to do at the time, but I was willing to explore opportunity.

She nodded in approval and then told me about a business meeting that was going on that day that talked about new opportunities for college students. I was sort of interested, but more concerned about getting to class. Before I left, she asked me if I could leave my email or cell phone number on the survey so she could talk to me more about it later on, since I was going to be late. I wrote it down for. “Thanks,” she said with a smile as I nodded and left to class, thinking that this wasn’t going to be too serious.

Later that afternoon when I was lying around in my room, I got a call from an unknown number and picked it up. “Hi, do you remember me? I’m that girl you talked to today,” a recognizable voice said. It was the survey girl. “Oh yeah… Hi,” I hesitantly replied. We had some small chat about life. In between the conversation, she asked me if I was still interested in going to a business meeting that she was talking about. There was a pause, and I pondered the idea for a second. I didn’t have anything else to do that night, but I didn’t want to waste an entire night going to a meeting that I barely knew anything about.  She waited for a response.

“Yeah, sure, when is it?”

“Cool. It starts at 7, but we have to leave at 5:30 because it takes about an hour to get there. Can you wait out in the curb? Me and my friends will pick you up.”

“Oh… okay.”

“Great! Oh yeah, one more thing. Since this is a professional business meeting, do you mind wearing semi-formal attire?”

I looked at my pajamas and basketball shorts.

“Yeah, I figure something out.”

“Cool! I’ll see you there.”

“Bye.”

At 5:30 P.M., a truck pulled on the side of the curb. A guy was driving with a girl sitting next to him in front. My new friend was sitting in the back. I realized that they were all nicely dressed when I opened the door. There was an empty seat just for me.

It was night time when we got there, but we were early. This place looked a lot better than I expected; in fact, it was absolutely gorgeous. There were colorful lights everywhere. The building seem to be made of marble stone. To top it off, there were many nice looking BMW’s and Mercedes-Benz were parked in front. It really looked like a high-class hotel.

Once we got in, we were seated on wooden chairs with red cushion. I talked to my friend while observing the people there. There were also college students that came from other campuses, all well-dressed. Some even wore business suits on. I felt a little intimidated.

After almost an hour of waiting, finally, we were allowed into the meeting. As we walked down the hallway towards the door, I noticed that there were beautiful pictures on the wall. It almost felt liked the hotel had suddenly changed into an art gallery.

The doors opened and I was surprised to see how many people there were inside. The place probably had around hundred students sitting side by side next to each other. We were awaiting a presentation by someone that who was well known in this community. There was definitely a lot of anticipation.

Suddenly, the lights appeared and a guy with frizzled, slick-back hair greeted all of us with an enthusiastic voice. I heard loud clapping, cheers, and excitement filled the room. The projection slide came down and the presentation began. I don’t remember his exact words of the meeting, but I sort of went like this.

“Welcome!”

People shouted and cheered.

“How would you guys want to make more money in college!?” The room roared. I even started to get enthused by the energy of the speaker and the audience. At the very least, I was intrigued.

“Awesome!”

The man then began to speak of story about how he wanted to retire early and support his grandma. His grandma was one of the closest people to him and he wanted to offer things to her that she couldn’t afford to buy in her lifetime. The more he talked about his relationship between his dream and his grandma, the more touching the story became, and the more engaged I became in it. He felt trapped however, because  he couldn’t do this. His old job required him to work about forty hours a week, and he pointed out that by the time he retired, it might have been too late.

Now he started to speak with more passion. He talked about how he eventually started a company that allowed him to have this freedom and financial ability that he wanted to help him pursue his dream. He then told everybody to look at the projection and the music started. It went through a slide show of all the things that people were able to accomplish through this company; everything from nice houses to nice Lamborghini’s to VIP parties and most of all, people smiling and having a good time. He said, he was not able to do this, if he were to stay at his old company and waited until he was really old. He asked the crowd, if we wanted the same freedom too. The audience, including my friend, and even me this time shouted, “Yeah!”

He told us how the process worked by methods of how we can add members to the company. Every time we added a member, whether it was a friend, a family member, or a stranger, we would be one hundred and fifty dollars. That’s a lot of money i thought. Maybe this job, or whatever you call it, might be worth it after all.

“Welcome aboard our newest member! This week, he has just made his first two sales and earned his money back! He is on his way to success. Give him a hand everybody!”

People clapped and cheered.

“And that’s it. All you need to do is add members to the company, and you will get a percentage of what they earn. Now, I know what you’re all thinking. It’s going to take forever for me to reach the top! That’s not true. This job isn’t for quitters. If you keep working at it, eventually, you’ll have tier below you and you will be on your way to living the dream you want. It took me two years to get where I am and you guys can do it too!”

People cheered again. I was actually felt pretty pumped myself. This doesn’t sound too hard. My looked at me and asked if I was interested and I said yes, “Yes!” I asked her how do I join and she said that I needed to put in a down payment of three hundred dollars, and within two recruit members, I would have earned my money back and be on the way to keeping whatever the rest of the money after that.

“Are you in?” she said with a smile.

“Let’s do this,” I replied.

“Okay, I need you to sign this though.”

We walked out and started heading back to our campus to get the money. I had just signed a paper for entering this business. My heart was pumping. Throughout the entire way home, I thought about how great it would be to have a job paying you one hundred a fifty dollars per person you recruit. People on campus were slaving away for seven dollars per hour doing “campus services” and needless to say, they were dreadful jobs.

During the quiet ride home, my excitement gradually started to wane though. Something told me that the process looked too good to be true. I started become skeptical, but another voice in my mind was telling me that I had already committed. We had already spent an ten hours from the time I’ve met here to this long car ride back and forth. Just get this over with.

Her friends parked at the curb and told them to wait. The night was awfully silent. I could hear our footsteps as we walked towards the nearest college campus ATM machine. I couldn’t believe what I was doing. I had just got into college and I was already going to dish out three hundred dollars in cash to this person I barely even knew. Halfway to the ATM machine, that same feeling crept onto me again. This time it was more powerful. I kept repressing it down, telling it that it was already too late. I was already here and I’m not a person who likes to make false promises.

We got to the ATM machine. It was brightly lit and hard to miss.  My friend stood next to me. I could hear my heart beating faster and I knew her friends were waiting in the car waiting for her to get the money from me. I looked at the ATM machine. It was now or never. I knew my parents deposited a couple hundred dollars for me to buy school supplies, but I could earn that back… right? At that moment, I realized that I just couldn’t do it.

I looked over to my friend and did my best to make a horrible last-minute excuse.

“Hey, I’m sorry but… I just got into college and… I think I need this money for school,” I said with a cracked voice. There was a pause. She looked at me. I thought she was explode. Instead, she just said, “I understand.”

“So… hat about your friends?” I asked

“I’ll just tell them that I got the money,” she said with a half smile, this time not as bright as before.

“Thanks… I’m sorry about this.”

She smiled one last time and left, leaving me by myself. I felt guilty afterwards for doing that, but my inner voice was telling me that I did the right thing. I walked back to my door room in the chilly night with a sign of relief.

A few months later, I realized that what I was about to join at that time was called “a pyramid scheme”. I had no idea what that was at the time but I had researched more about it. One day when I was in my dorm, that same girl showed up. We greeted each other and talked about school. Then, somehow the topic of that night came up. I asked her how her “business” was doing. She told me that the entire thing collapsed and that she got out of it. She add more details about how the entire thing was a fluke. I responded with an, “Oh…” but inside I was telling myself, “Yes!” (in terms of me, of course ).

We became good friends after that and I asked her why she wanted to join something like that. She told me that she needed the money badly, that there was many problems going in the household, including financial ones. She became somewhat emotional after that.

I will always remember that experience because I have encountered similar situations even nowadays that remind me of it. I know exactly what people who are trying to get you to “take a survey” really want from you.

The lesson I have learned from this that I want to spread to you, even if you already know it, is to go with your intuition whenever you feel like it is trying to tell you something important. They often arise in moments of intense pressure and are trying to send you a message. Even if you might not  know the answer right away, or why a situation is happening, your emotions, or that “gut feeling” that you get, usually will guide you to the right path. In the end, you never know what kind of valuable experience you will learn later on in life from making a decision based on trusting your intuition.

photo credit: http2007

During my senior year of high school, I wanted to join a team that didn’t involve a ball. I’ve always enjoyed running and seeing others run. Great runners always seem to have a certain determined look on their faces, yet a calm relaxed energy around them too. I thought I would give cross-country a try. I had never done it before, but I knew it required one thing: a lot of running.

Like basketball, the coach made us to a lot of different drills, except most of these drills were meant to strengthen your leg muscles and test your endurance. It’s easy for someone to say, “Go run for a long time” as practice (and we did, sometimes for many miles a day to places I had never seen before), but that wasn’t all there was to a fast runner in the most crucial times of the races. What helped was a mixture of different distances of runs – short and long.

Most people might think running long distance is easy. After all, there’s not that much skilled involved. But when you’re running cross country, you no longer are running for the heck of it, you are running to push yourself to get a better time each time.

Some people may have taken cross country as a way to weight and I don’t blame them; you will lose weight if you do cross country. Time, for these people, isn’t as serious. But for the people who joined cross country as a way of seeing how fast you could run during a race (3 miles), every ounce of energy, every droplet of sweat, and every second in time counts.

In my very first race, I remember feeling different emotions going through the entire start to finish process. For the 1st mile, you run fast and think that this is a breeze, for the 2nd mile you start to get tired and wonder where is the finish line, for the 3rd mile, not only do you feel like your legs are about to collapse, but feel like you want to puke. But the thing is, however tired you may be during a race, you never stop until you reach the end.

My PR (personal record) was 18:36 which is quite slow in the world of cross country (just a little over 6 minutes a mile). There were many people who ran over 20 minutes a mile. One of my friends came in so slow, that they stopped the timer before he ever had a chance to finish. But I’d always admire people that could run 3 miles in the 15 minute range. I knew those people were the best of the best, taking massive amounts of discipline and practice to finish in a time like that.

The different thing about cross country and the other sports I played, basketball and tennis, was that you really never have any opponents. In basketball you have a team playing against another team. In tennis you’re on one side of the court playing against an opponent on the other side of the court. And although in the cross country races, you may be running with one hundred other people at once, you’re biggest opponent is time. You don’t have that control over how to outplay your opponents like in basketball or tennis. The only thing you can really concentrate on improving is how fast and how long your two legs can endure for.

And that’s the biggest lesson I learned from cross country – endurance. People may think that cross country is all physical, since all your really doing is running. But during the moment, a lot of it surprisingly is mental. From the emotions you’re going through while you’re running to the things that you are thinking about, all these things affect your ability to carry on towards the finish line when you’re body is telling you to stop.

I think that’s also how life is when it comes to getting things done. Whether it is to finish at the finish line or to accomplish a goal that we want, one must be able to have the strength to continue, to last, and to go through hardships despite obstacles such as discouragement, or in the case of running, fatigue. Some people in cross country give up and sit on the side lines, watching others move ahead, while others don’t care how tired they are, they just want to finish.

Ultimately, cross country has taught this me lesson which is that if we want to finish something, whether it’s crossing the finish line or finishing a project, we must be able to endure through the tough times and just keep going.

Photo Credit: espinr

My best friend at the time and I were really into tennis in high school. We would talk about it nonstop during summer, from what kind of rackets were the best kinds to the newest updates in the world of tennis. He was a better tennis player than me and taught me lots of tennis tips while training for hours on the court. We were practicing for hours during many days of the week to make the JV team at our school.

Our training paid off. I made the JV team and he eventually went on to play Varsity. I was happy nevertheless, because he had been playing tennis for most of his life, while I just started really playing for a couple of months. It was my “second-hand” sport, but what drew me to the game was the constant action and awareness involved when playing the game. When dealing with sports, I don’t like standing around. I always want to be on the move.

Unlike basketball however, you can’t just be on the move running up and down on the court. Every foot step you take on the court matters, because tennis is a game about control. If you cannot control how you play, how you move, and how you occupy court territory, then you will not be a good tennis player. These things are essential to the game.

Just like when you swing at the ball, the most important thing you have to master is top spin. Without top spin, the ball will go flying out of bounds every time. Top spin helps the ball stay inbounds because the ball spins “inwards” causing the pathway of the ball to curve, rather than making it a straight line.

In order to have a perfect projection it requires control of how fast you hit the ball and how much top spin you put on the ball. This can only be done practiting swinging at the ball hundreds of thousands of times.

The second half of winning the game is understanding your opponent’s weaknesses. Unlike basketball which you have four other players on your team to support you, the only other person out there to support you is yourself. That’s why you must be able to identify the opponent’s weaknesses and exploit them.

If they are only good at hitting the ball from the right, hit at the ball at their left every time. If they like to lob the ball up in the sky, make sure you hit it so back so fast they it catches them by surprise. Some people have no idea how to return balls that spin a lot, so adding more spin than usually can really mess up their swinging pattern. Whatever it happens to be, identify and exploit your opponents weaknesses, then you have the edge everytime.

Now, comparing actually practice to basketball season, practice in tennis was a breeze. Running was minimal. Tennis is a pretty straight forward game – no need for complicated plays or military-like drills. Just hit the ball back. Games were always fun to play because they were fast paced and mostly because you could control how you wanted the game to be.

This is what I liked about tennis. You were responsible for every point and you were responsible for your wins and losses. I liked this because unlike basketball, if your teammates don’t know what they are doing and do things like ball hog the ball or are just plain clumsy, you suffer as a team due to something that is not entirely your fault. But with tennis, you have 100% control over everything.

What did I learn from tennis that can be applied to life? Well the first thing is life is about control. Whatever outcome you want in life, you are the person in control of it. Not the person across from you, not your friends, family, neighbors, people you see on TV; you are 100% in control of what your day will look like tomorrow do to you actions today. You can either lose in life or win in life, the choice is up to you and just like tennis, you must constantly practice in order to make things perfect. As they say, practice makes perfect, and it’s no different from playing tennis or playing life.

The second thing is if you happen to be in a business where it is highly competitive (most business are competitive anyway), one thing that may help you out is learning about your opponent’s weaknesses. It may not be necessary thing to exploit them, but see what they don’t have that you can add to make your position better. Just like tennis, this requires observing you opponents while learning from their behaviors at the same time. Then just doing something different and better. By just mastering this one trait, you’ll usually advance further than other people doing the same thing.

If you watch any professional tennis game, you can learn a lot from the players and how they go about winning the game. You can see it in games that really matter and how much effort they put in just to win that one point. Sometimes rallies will seem to go on forever, but in the end, you’ll that the person who understands their opponent more and has control over the game, ends up winning.

Gain a competitive edge by learning from other people, but most importantly don’t let life just win you over. Take control.

Photo Credit: jModus

Before freshman year of high school, my dad and my goal was to make the freshman basketball team. I had played basketball all my life, and my dad was very, very passionate about basketball.

To prepare, we would wake up around 6AM to go to the park. Usually it was very foggy. We had a simply routine which basically involved me shooting the basketball a couple of hundred times where he would retrieve the ball for me every time. I thought it was easier since I was doing the fun part, until one hour of consecutive shooting made more arms flimsy, but he still had the passion to pass me the ball every time, demanding me to be more accurate.

Sometimes he would yell at me if I got tired; other times we wouldn’t be able to leave until I made ten consecutive free throws. The pressure and discipline was there, but nothing compared to what I would face in the future.

When basketball tryouts came out, I was very nervous. My dad and I had practiced all summer and this was a do-or-die moment. Like a job interview, I remember the tryouts were separated three parts. If you passed the first tryout, you advance. If you didn’t, you would be cut and have to tryout next year. There ended up being two teams, a blue and a red team. Out of the 30 or 40 people who tried out, I ended up making it until the end – barely.

I was relieved and my dad was happy for me. My closest friends from middle school who I played basketball with every day in the morning, lunch, and afternoon ended up not making the team, so I kind of felt bad, but what I experienced in basketball practice, I look back and think maybe that got a break.

Basketball practice was something I had never experienced in my life. I thought basketball was supposed to be “fun”. Instead, it was torturous. Our coaches demanded us to train like we had never trained before, for hours.

We didn’t get to play a lot of basketball, much of it was drills I had never done before. We would do things like run around the school, while the last person had to run to the front of the line so he had to advance his speed quicker than the entire team whom were already running at a steady, face pace.

There was something called defensive stance, in which we were ordered to go into a defensive like stance. In this stance, you put on arm up and one arm down like you are guarding somebody. Your back posture had to remain straight. Your legs bent at the right angle, and most importantly, the soles of your feet can never touch the ground. The coaches would know if you were cheating if they could not slide a piece of paper halfway under your feet. Remaining in this posture for 10 minutes made people moan and groan.

We would do something called ditches, which everybody hated. Basically, it meant the entire team going literally to a big ditch. We would walk up and down these ditches at a 45 degree angle a hundred times. For people who complained, more were added. Towards the end, it felt like a never ending experience.

We would also do another drill called suicides. This was by far the most painful. At the end of a two hour practice where everybody was tired, in order for us to go home, the coach had everybody line up across the sideline of the basketball court. It was our job to run from sideline to sideline 17 times in 60 seconds or under. That means you have no more than 4 seconds to get from one side to another side, doing this consecutively for 17 times which coaches monitoring. If you failed, not only did no one get to go home, but the entire team would have to start over again.

When we did play, a lot of it was memorizing plays, nothing compared to the “free play” that I had been used to. This probably required to most internal pressure of practice mainly because others were trying to compete for your spot in order to start on the team. Often times, if you made one mistake, like I did, you would immediately put on the sidelines by the coach, and replaced by somebody else. You had to be alert at memorizing and obeying orders at all time.

Although we all thought our team was well trained during practice, we were not trained when it came to the real games. The coach was usually angry at us most of the times usually because of stupid mistakes we would make or our ability to win close games, but then blow it in the end.

Because I was scrawny at the time, the coach didn’t have a lot of confidence in me so I didn’t get to play much. I was usually the rooter (yes, you know that guy). The times when I did get to play, it was either really brief or when we knew that the game was ours, meaning we had won by a lot.

When we lost games however, the punishment was a long, quiet bus ride home or the coach yelling at us the entire way home. On top of that, more time in practice was spent which meant more drills, suicides, push-ups, memorizing plays, you name it.

To sum it up, my dream of what I thought being on the basketball team would be like, ended up to be hell in my first year of high school.

However, I did learn two important lessons from all of it. The first one was every ounce of pain that I went through made me a stronger person, from weight lifting after practice was over to boxing a person out and never letting him touch the ball. It was deadly competitive and I knew the coaches never respected anybody who made excuses. You either gave it all that you got or go home.

The second lesson is that I had been a pretty solid shooter up until that point. That was one of the best aspects of me was that I was skilled at shooting the ball from midrange. That is what separated me from other players, but I depended on that way too much. There’s a saying basketball that says, “You live by the shot, you die by the shot.”

I relied too much on the shot and realized that I was focusing too much on myself. No one cared if you knew how to shoot well, because frankly, it’s easy to shoot well when nobody is on you, but when you have a good defender with long arms, it’s nearly impossible. What’s more important is doing a play right and getting a wide open shot, and that required teamwork – a team identity as one instead of an individual identity trying to separate himself from the team. When I look back on it, that’s much of what I did. Basketball is a team game; it’s never about one person. That’s what wins games and championships.

How does playing basketball affect my life or somebody’s life success? Well what I learned is that after going through one of the most painful experiences in my life, a lot of everything else after that never measured up. When joined other sports teams later and heard people complaining about running one lap around the school, I kid of just looked at them and said to myself, “Are you kidding me?”

The more pain you can endure from life, the more experience you get from it. I could of quit the basketball team at anytime, even when I didn’t much playing time and even when it was taking hours away from my academics, but I didn’t want to quit half way through and not gain the experience from finishing. Winners don’t quit. They persevere. I don’t think I would have that time of experience for something else.

Secondly, if you happen to be in an environment where you’re working with people, you must learn to cooperate and think as a team. How can you help the team even if it’s something small? You have to think in terms of not what is good for, but what is good for the team. By doing this, you’re opening up yourself up to the full picture and making yourself a leader.

These are some of the things I learned from basketball and which I think could be applied to anybody’s life. Even when you start something new at first and face hardship, don’t give up. It’s worth the experience at the end. As the common saying goes, “No pain, no gain.”

Photo Credit: StuSeeger

I took a look at the side of my bed today and remember that a few weeks ago, I had the stomach flu and that was the spot where I vomited. I got the stomach flu from eating a sandwich I bought outside. I get sick here and there, such as getting a cold or the fever, but rarely do I ever get a stomach flu. In fact the last time I got the stomach flu was probably years and years ago so I’ve been pretty much oblivious to what it feels like.

However, during those few days under the sickness, and in my entire adult life, I have never experience sickness like that before to the point where I felt like I wouldn’t be able to reach the next day.

During a period of 24 hours, all I did was sleep. I felt like a heavy weight was put on me, preventing me to get up and do anything. And when I did get up, I could barely stand, going from place to place guided by placing my hand on objects around the house. It was impossible to drink anything, even water, without a feeling in my tongue salivating me to throw up. Food was not an option either.

When I was in bed, I had major chills, a feeling of being extremely cold on the inside, but then hot in the outside where I was sweating a lot. Going to the bathroom was a frequent thing for me to do, since I constantly felt the need to puke, but getting there felt almost impossible. Finally, I was sent to a doctor, where, upon getting from my house to the car to the point of getting a needle inserted into my arm, breathing was very hard to do.

To say the least, it was an indescribable feeling; almost as if that entire time I had the stomach flu, it took an extreme of effort just to stay conscious, and when I was conscious, I was at a point when I was breathing so hard, wanting all the mental and physical pain to stop, that I all I was thinking about was one question:

“If I could do anything just to breathe normally again…”

After I got a shot from the doctor, I began to recover within a few days. It all had felt like a nightmare that finally ended. When I was able to speak, move, and talk normally again, I pondered back on what had just happened.

I just went through something that is considered minor to a lot of people, but to me, it was something that I have never felt before to that extent. I mean, being on the verge of throwing up and trying to repress it from happening telling yourself, “Don’t throw up, you can hold it in, just wait it out…” all while breathing heavily for hours and leaning over a trash can is an experience that I never want to experience again in my life.

And yet, there are some people in this planet that go through this type of pain – not stomach pain per se – but other types of pains worse than mine on a daily basis.

Sometimes I go through my day wanting more than I already have, whether this is having more friends, more money, more stylish clothes, more entertainment, whatever it is, I forget the one thing that I take granted for everyday that I should want more of – and that is having one more day to live.

Having the stomach flu perhaps wasn’t a life or death experience now that I think back on it, but it taught me that most people in their lives keep complaining about the things they don’thave, rather than looking at things they do have.

Because, they are never happy in life. They are always looking for something that they don’t have and when they don’t have it, it causes frustration, and sometimes even anger.

I knew that after I had recovered, that moment of just being out of misery was one of the best feelings of my life. I knew that it might be impossible to look in the future that same type of feeling, but it did allow me to look at my life from a different perspective that I am not normally aware of.

And that perspective is simply being alive – being alive today. Many people take life and healthy body for granted, but when you are you grateful for being alive, for being able to justdo things without pain, it gives you a boost of energy to do more as well as a feeling of happiness inside.

Perhaps it’s time to revaluate the things we don’t have, and look at the things we do have. I’m not talking about having a house, having a pet dog, or having a car, I’m talking about being able to breath, move freely, and enjoy life in the moment. That “ability” is something that we shouldn’t take for granted because who knows when someday we might not have it again, say even for a few days of having the stomach flu.

Photo Credit: madmolecule

So today’s Sunday and it’s usually a day where I take a break from blogging during daytime and spend some time with people, usually family, that I don’t really get as much time to during the weekdays. My uncle yesterday asked some of us if we wanted to go out to watch a movie today and so I agreed, not knowing which movie we were going to see.

When I was informed that we were going to see the Night at the Museum 2, I kind of groaned inside since the movie looked like it was meant for little kids. But since my two younger cousins wanted to see it, I just went along with it and we all went out to see it as a Sunday family movie get together.

At first, I did not know what to expect since I’ve never seen the first one, but the plot was not very difficult to figure out. It’s starts off with a well off businessman (played by Ben Stiller) named Larry Daley who is interviewed on a show to promote his new invention: the glow in the dark flashlight. Later, he revisits the museum he used to work at, as a night guard, and notices that all the meaningful pieces are being shipped off to the Federal Archives since people nowadays, want an upgraded museum with futuristic technology. He has one night to prevent this from happening.

During this one night, he goes through a good versus evil adventure with some rather amusing characters of the movie, including Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams), Kahmunrah the Evil Pharaoh (Hank Azaria), Jedediah Smith (Owen Wilson), and Theodore Roosevelt (Robin Williams). Larry gets a call from Jedidiah Smith saying that they are being attacked by the evil pharaoh’s army who is looking for a magical table - a tablet that is supposed to unleashed all of the underworld’s minions to destroy the world in which he will conquer. It’s Larry’s job to protect this from happening all before sunrise, which he successful does so with the help of his affectionate companion Amelia Earhart.

At the end of the movie, the pieces of the museum are saved, instead of being shipped off. The museum opens to the New York public and somehow all the characters – statues, sculptures, fossils , etc. – come back alive again because of  magical tablet (the main prize during  the movie) and become is just as entertaining to the public as any futuristic museum would be. Larry Daley then sells his business and returns to being a night guard for the museum. As the movie is about to retire, he spots the exact person that plays Amelia Earhart in the museum; they meet each other, and she asks him to show him around, which he agrees to do so.

I didn’t really go into the movie expecting anything much, but after seeing it, it wasn’t that bad. I’d say it’s a good 105 minutes of heartwarming entertainment for light audiences. Most people, especially my family who started to talk about what to do next after the movie, would probably view this film as a see-and-forget type movie. C’mon let’s face it, how many of these movies are there? Too many. But I try to see if movies contain a message that’s deeper than just visual entertainment, because entertainment to me is not that big of a deal and doesn’t have a lasting, meaningful effect. That’s why I’m not that big of a fan of stupid comedy type movies.

But watching this movie, the simple, overall message I would say is do something that you love and you will seek true happiness. Simple, but profound, and is easily embedded through Larry’s (Ben Stiller) storyline from the beginning of the movie to the end of the movie.

For example, he was made fun of in the beginning of the movie by George Foreman, who pokes fun at him for being a “night guard” at a museum, a job that isn’t really comparable to being the “head man at” a large company. The audience laughs. As he walks out of the business, you can tell that although he’s wearing a business suit and drives a nice car, a part of him seems missing.

In the middle of the movie, he confronts Theodore Roosevelt (Robbin Williams) riding a horse before the entire exhibit will be shipped out the next day. Theodore speaks with him and his finals words, “Larry, the key to true happiness is…” but then Larry is interrupted by a business call. When he looks back up again, but it’s too late as sunrise has already turned these figures back into inanimate objects.

It isn’t until the end where the movie almost ends and he gets another chance to ask Theodore Roosevelt, “Hey, do you remember back when you said what is the key to true happiness until we got cut off by sunrise?”

“Oh, yes.” Theodore replies.

“Well, I figured it out,” Larry says.

“And what it is?”

“It’s doing the things you love, with the people you love.”

“Oh… I was just going to say physical exercise, but that works too.”

Theodore gives him a pat and walks off. It’s funny, but profound at the same time. Larry learns than it’s not about being famous, wearing a nice suit, or driving a nice car, but about doing the things you love and doing it with the people you love, which to him was, exploring the museum exhibit as a night guard and with all the different historical characters of the movie.

The lesson I got out of this that I would want to share with other people is if you have a job that you hate and you’re just doing it solely because of money, maybe it might not be a bad idea to reconsider choosing a job that you love even though you might not get as much money. To some people, true happiness doesn’t just have to come from money, but simply from just what you do and who you do it with.

So it might be a idea to think of, and who knows, maybe the best thing to do, is mix the best of both worlds. But for the sake of this movie, Larry ended up not having to really work because he enjoyed what he did, and that can be summed up in a famous quote by Confucius, “Choose a job that you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

Photo Credit: Lisa Andres