Great movies are life-changing.

Some can lift you up, others can break you into tears.

A phenomenal movie can make you think or reevaluate your life purpose and the lessons that entail.

It can change your life forever.

Others are deep, they can inspire and influence you to do great things in your life that you have yet to comprehend.

Each of these movies I first saw after my life’s biggest challenge.

And they have been chosen for exactly what they ALL are; movies that have altered my perception, impacted my lifestyle and influenced my reaction to external circumstances.

This list contains movies, that I have watched countless times. Each time it gave me new insight. Observations I haven’t considered before.

They are in no particular order, but I guarantee if you watch at least 10 of them, your life will change forever.

In movies, there is a thin line between lessons and entertainment.

Choosing what you take away from watching a movie widens the gap between those who want to learn about life and those who want to be entertained.

 

These movies are not about fancy special effects. They are simply creative and unique stories. They offer not only entertainment but meaningful life lessons.

I’ve loved movies since I was kid. I loved the main ingredient of imagining what’s possible in life. It’s like living countless lives.

Movies allow you to step into the shoes of different kinds of people. Strangers.

For instance, watching Bohemian Rhapsody is like waking up in the shoes of a Rock and Roll Star. This is what the life of an eccentric, generational talent looks like. It was the perfect biopic of a legend. And it was inspirational.

I loved Freddie. I couldn’t stop playing and replaying his songs on YouTube and relive the moment when he performed Live for the LIVE AID.

Freddie Mercury was a misfit and an outcast. He didn’t feel he belonged. So it resonated with me. If there’s one thing I believe, it’s the idea that music is a medical care for the soul.

Music is the stuff of life. Weaving story and song fuels meaning to each individual’s existence.

It certainly gave me mine.

And Inception played by Leonardo DiCaprio gave me a life-changing idea. You can purposely infect your mind with an idea. But once the mind is completely stretched by a new idea, it never regains its previous form. (e.g. working for people versus working for myself).

That was the basis of my first 6-figure publishing business.

However, sometimes you get infected with the wrong ideas. And that can be disadvantageous to you.

Be very cautious with what you feed your mind.

My criteria for inspiring movies:

• More emphasis on story than action
• Pushes you to look from a renewed perspective
• A great script

And, MOST IMPORTANTLY, they beat stereotypes. Not every movie below does but 11 of the 21 do. Some may contain SPOILERS!

1) Life of Pi

Who would have thought that a voyage at sea can send you into the deepest depths of the soul.

This adventure drama revolves around an Indian boy, Pi who survives a a storm at sea and manages to cling onto a lifeboat. He shares this lifeboat with a ferocious Bengal Tiger.

Pi finds himself in a situation that would require him to shape his own fate by action.

Hunger forced him to lose many of the cultural and religious assumptions about the simple nature of right and wrong.

He was a prisoner of this lifeboat. Like all of humanity, stuck on a pale blue dot, a speck of dust floating in a vast ocean of cosmic matter.

Like it or not, no one is going to come and rescue us. We’re on our own.

 

 

Even in such terrible psychic and physical stress, Pi was able to preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom.

You can take everything away from a man but one thing: The last of human freedoms – to choose one’s own way.

At each moment, you can make a decision which determined whether or not you would submit to the powers of circumstance.

As terrified as Pi was, he soon realizes that the tiger and himself must co-exist in order to survive the lonely voyage.

The tiger being a reflection of his animal self.

There’s good and bad, the Yin and Yang, one must learn to find peace from within.

So what about the Life of Pi that I loved? This Carnivorous island scene right here;

 

 

This island of Vishnu suggests that all of suffering is dreamt up.

In Hinduism, the universe and what we all experience is a product of Vishnu’s dream.

It suggests that life includes birth, old age, sickness and death. And what we all suffer from the stages of life is ineradicable.

Without suffering and death, life cannot be complete.

The way in which you accept your fate and all the suffering it entails, gives you ample opportunity – even under the most difficult circumstances – to add deeper meaning to your life.

Like Pi, you could remain dignified, brave and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight of self-preservation, you may forget your dignity and turn into an animal.

In suffering, you gain an opportunity to attain moral values that are difficult to have.

This will ultimately decide whether or not you’re worthy of all your sufferings.

 

2) Pursuit of Happiness

Pursuit of happiness is a must-watch biopic of Chris Gardner, a salesman who is trying to make a living selling a bulky but portable ‘bone density scanner.”

Early in his life, he took a huge gamble and thought it would ultimately pay-off.

But it didn’t go according to plan, and right after his wife left him; he had to endure the fate of living in chronic poverty.

I break into tears every time I watch this scene:

 

 

Gardner is a living proof that a man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.

Such men are not only those living in poverty.

Everywhere, man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.

My own suffering brought me down to my knees.

Nothing is gonna hit as hard as life.

Fate could have beaten me to the ground and kept me there permanently if I allowed it.

Being able to take the hits and keep moving forward is the only way to win.

 

3) Interstellar

I want to watch this movie for the first time again!!!

The clash between gravity and quantum mechanics couldn’t hit as hard as this masterpiece.

It gave me a modern understanding of gravity, time and space how we’re utterly powerless against it.

All we do is worry about our place in the dirt. How we can be momentary masters of this fraction of a dot floating in the cosmic arena.

A thought transfixed while watching this movie with kick-ass surround sound.

For the first time, I saw the truth as it is set in motion by one particular scene.

I finally grasped the meaning of the greatest secret in the universe.

No one can tell another what’s the meaning or purpose of life.

You must find that out for yourself, and accept the responsibility that your answer prescribes.

If you succeed, you will continue to grow in spite of all indignities.

If there is one last way in which a man may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, it is in contemplation of the stars.

 

4) Bohemian Rhapsody

Nothing really matters in the end.

When you die, everything you aspire to achieve will end up in tatters.

So why not pursue something you love doing for life.

Don’t choose fame and fortune,

Don’t subscribe to the agendas of society,

Choose to be yourself.

Be a Maverick!!

What’s unfortunate is, Freddie flew too close to the sun, and he got burned.

Too much of a good thing will kill you.

The journey to stardom is filled with traps.

If you’re not careful, they can be damaging.

In far too many people, the achievement of these objectives creates a moral self-trap.

Once you allow your inner hold on these moral and spiritual sense to subside, you will fall victim to circumstance.

 

5) The Shawshank Redemption

What brilliant acting by Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins.

Restrict a man’s freedom, and the whole structure of his inner life changes.

While some display signs of decay, others cling to shreds of hope.

In this movie, life boils down to these simple words: Get busy living, or get busy dying.

Life in prison tears open the human soul and exposes its depths.

Watch this movie very closely, because it covers hope and courage in a way that everyone can relate to.

Hope can really set you free, but it could also kill you inside.

 

6) The Greatest Showman

An original musical that celebrates the life of P.T. Barnum, a visionary that remade himself from his humble beginnings into the greatest showman of his generation.

This is a story of a man who didn’t let the hard times stop him from trying.

We all try to make ourselves comfortable, by setting goals of buying that dream house, have a dream job, create wealth for ourselves, and so on.

The struggle to achieve these objectives are rewarding.

But in the end, the achievement creates something of a trap.

The struggle is often times better than the achievement.

We were made for action.

The Hedonic Treadmill is unfulfilling.

The ambition sets our struggle in motion, but when you look back at life, you’ll find that the struggle itself is more meaningful than when the objectives are fully achieved.

Of course, for most people, we only meet our objectives halfway or partially.

 

 

7) Truman Show

This is a movie within a movie.

And the star of this movie doesn’t even know that he’s the lead actor.

He was born and bred on the stage, owned by the production company.

This movie is watched by millions.

The idea of the Truman Show is baked into the philosophy that life is often a stage pre-programmed by society, by the media, Hollywood producers, puppet-masters, our school, parents, teachers, friends and family.

You are powerless against such authority because your mind is bounded by one.

The only way to bring about a new mind, to break away from authority itself is to destroy the old unconscious and the conscious defenses, securities that you have built up internally over the decades.

To be free, you have to be utterly defenseless.

Then you will begin to see the whole skeleton of authority.

It requires you to have a sharp mind, not a dull brain.

This movie brings me to an even more important concept for living life, introduced below.

 

8) Inception

Inception is not an easy movie to decipher.

For one, you need a great deal of imagination.

The most arcane aspects of this movie lies under highly complex and multi-layered scripts.

Christopher Nolan is a genius architect of storytelling.

Here’s my favorite line:

Listen, there’s something you should know about me… about inception. An idea is like a virus, resilient, highly contagious. The smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.

Just as my experience is the result of my conditioning, your mind is the result of your conditioning.

But every once in a while, the mind latches onto an idea, maybe something you desire so much, that you want to become that.

It’s your ideal self. A self-projection.

You end up struggling towards that projection. But its a moving target.

You never get satisfied with what you are.

You’re struggling to become something, that ideal self.

Like chasing your own shadow, your mind has played a trick on itself.

Once you’re aware of this trick, you can clearly see the illusion of your greatest desire.

Like a fire that can never be put out.

 

9) Schindler’s List

This is the story of an industrialist who saw wealth as his only life-long pursuit.

He did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.

One of the most touching scenes in cinematic history, not to mention in real-life.

“If I could save just one more life…”

He was a lowlife. A gambler, a drunk and a spy for the Nazis in Czechoslovakia.

There was not an ounce of moral fiber in him. Not a hint of spiritual achievement.

But when the time came, a time when life would confront him with great destiny, he met it with equal spiritual greatness.

As his inner life became more and more intense, he also experienced the beauty of LIFE like never before.

 

10) Forest Gump

Fate is not the same for everyone.

The life that has been given to you includes everything in between.

The expected or unexpected destiny, chance and conclusion.

If you rebel, exercise your freedom and take risks, you might earn a different fate.

This movie is a paradigm of freedom for all.

Gump references this frequently: My momma always said, “Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.“

 

11) Fight Club

I let the quotes of this movie speak for itself;

• Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
• The things you own end up owning you.
• It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.

If you do not know me before the acid test. I was a proud, and arrogant man. I wondered, every second of my life, why the universe confronted me with such a predicament.

It happened for no reason at all. I committed no crime.

At such a time, it is not the physical pain that hurts the most, but the mental agony caused by the grave injustice.

The events that unfolded appeared to me almost as if I had been a dead man looking at everyone else from another world.

In robbing my pride, ego and SELF; I was defenseless, marching to my own funeral.

Naked in a way that I’ve lost Everything!!

Life had seemed to me absolutely without future.

But at such an exceptionally difficult external situation, it actually gave me the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond my-SELF!

It helped me find refuge from the unreasonableness of it all.

Few have been given the chance to make victory of these experiences turning life into inner triumph.

The words of Steve Jobs could be applied: “It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it”

Or I could have simply ignored the challenge and vegetate on the hospital bed like the rest of the acid burnt victims.

 

12) Batman Begins

The script in Batman Begins is really powerful stuff!!

I find myself taking in and digesting every word down to my own experiences.

ALL the suffering I’ve endured.

The rage, the tears, the pain (I had third degree burns half of my face, nearly cost one of my eye, all the way down to my neck, chest, hands and legs), I was admitted to a Cleanroom to stop my wounds from getting infected by external airborne germs and bacteria.

I couldn’t wear anything on the top half of my body.

Very cold, winds from the centralized air conditioning unit of the hospital struck me.

I kept thinking of the endless little problems and minor discomforts I once experienced before this.

What should we eat tonight? Can I get to work on time tomorrow? Should I join my friends for a good coffee?

I kept thinking about life’s trivial state of affairs.

I then forced my thoughts into something else completely.

First it was RAGE! The rage flowing like poison through my veins.

I wished I never existed, so I could be spared of my pain.

FEAR. I started to fear what’s inside of me.

I fear my own power, my anger to drive to do terrible and despicable things to get revenge.

I journeyed inwards to what I really feared inside of me.

Emotion is suffering.

It ceases to be one once I formed a clear and precise picture of it.

My goal is to find out Why…

My attempt to restore my inner strength is going to fail if I couldn’t find some future goal.

An AIM for my LIFE to target in order to strengthen my resolve; to bear the terrible circumstances of my very own existence.

At the end, it didn’t really matter what I expected out of life, but rather what life expected out of me.

P.S. Let me know which movies you’d like me to ADD. I’ve a much longer list, but I decided to stop elaborating unless I get a cool and decent response from the readers. Let me know in the comment below.

Suggestions: The Man from Earth, The Matrix, American History X, The Green Mile, Mr. Nobody, Cloud Atlas, Doctor Strange, Hacksaw Ridge, V for Vendetta. VOTE for your Favorite!!!