4 Life Lessons from Doctor Strange

I highly recommend this movie if you haven’t seen it yet. The writing, the acting, the action — an overall very well done movie. Possibly even my favorite movie of this year! For writing this blog post, I didn’t have to try very hard to come up with life lessons we can learn from this movie; they were so beautifully evident.

Warning: This post contains spoilers. I suggest you watch the movie first.

This post originally appeared on Anna’s 1st blog, Annamotion.

1. When you attach your life’s purpose to your work, you can easily lose your life’s purpose.

Doctor Strange put his all into his work and became very successful; however, because he put his entire life’s meaning in this one job, when he lost what enabled him to do his job (the effectiveness of his hands) he found himself lacking all purpose. Christine assures him he just needs to find a new purpose, but he won’t listen.

When we put all of our life’s meaning into our career, our spouse, a material possession, a certain hobby, etc.,  our very life’s purpose can be gone in an instant because none of it is guaranteed to last. We must put our life’s purpose into something more lasting–something that is eternal. Something that impacts more than just us.

2. “We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them.”

A quote from The Ancient One to Mordo. We catch snippets of Mordo describing his past self as being similar to Doctor Strange — disrespectful, selfish, and arrogant. Mordo says he fought and conquered his demons and this quote is The Ancient One’s response. Her statement rings true. As imperfect beings we never fully conquer the flaws and sinfulness within us, we merely win battles of a continuous war. We can grow into kinder, more selfless, and more honorable people, but we never lose the potential for error…for selfishness, bitterness, and deceitfulness to creep back in. We must choose each day, each moment, whether we will give in to “our demons” or rise above them.

3. You gain control by surrendering control.

Doctor Strange fights to have control over his body in learning the skills of the Ancient One; not only that, but he has lived a life of trying to remain in control even down to only picking patients he knew he could be successful with and to throwing all of his money away at a chance to gain control of his hands again. In a lesson from the Ancient One, she tells Doctor Strange that in order to gain control, he must surrender his control.

Having a tight grip on what’s in your hands may help you to hold onto something for a little longer; however, it also keeps you from letting anything else into your hands. A loose grip can both give and receive freely. Sometimes we gain more by letting go of more.

The more we try to control the things in our life, the more powerless we will feel because we can’t control everything. But if we learn to let go, we will find ourselves more in control of our emotions and responses to undesirable circumstances.

4. It’s not about you.

“Arrogance and fear still keep you from learning the simplest and most significant lesson of all.” “Which is?” “It’s not about you.”

I teared up when The Ancient One spoke these words because it’s something I’ve battled with before. A huge moment in my life was when I realized that fear of failure can actually be a form of pride. Obviously there are exceptions to this rule, but the majority of the time there’s at least some underlying vanity of why we don’t want to mess up.

There have been times with this blog where I get all worked up — “Why have there been less subscribers this month? Why did no one comment on this post? Why is no one sharing my work? Why am I not making any money yet? Should I even be a blogger? Should I just give up?” and I realized that this particular fear of failure was working separately from my mission statement: “to give women the knowledge, resources, encouragement, and inspiration they need to build a solid foundation for growth.”

The questions I should have been asking myself were “how can I encourage someone today? Who are my readers and how can I inspire them toward pursuing growth more strongly? What would help my readers?” But instead I made it about ME. When the truth is: I don’t write for me. Sure, I enjoy it, but I have a journal if I want to make it all about me. I write to HELP people and so that should always be my focus. If I’ve accomplished that, then I cannot fail. Even if I had to close down my blog, it would not be a failure because my mission statement was accomplished in the lives of many women.

When we go through this life making it all about us, then we will die with it being all about us and the world will all be the same after our disappearance. But if we take our focus off of ourselves, we can live for something much greater and longer lasting. When you die your money will go to someone else, your fame will be replaced with someone else’s fame, and your power will dissipate in the shadow of the current powers, BUT you can leave behind hope. You can leave behind love. You can leave behind lives changed who may go on to change more lives. Something else we take with us is who we are. Who do you want to be at the end of your life? You’re not guaranteed tomorrow, so work towards who you want to be right now.

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What lesson (listed above or not) from Doctor Strange impacted you the most?

 

Want to check out my other lessons from film posts?

• Lessons from Spider-Man: Far From Home
• Lessons from Avengers: Endgame
• 3 Life Lessons from Shazam!
• 3 Life Lessons from Captain Marvel
• 9 Life Lessons from Wonder Woman
• Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life Lesson
• A Lesson on Strength from Star Trek Beyond
• 6 Life Lessons We Can Learn from Captain America: Civil War
• 6 Life Lessons We Can Learn from Batman v Superman