How movies shape our lives
In recent years, I have been doing research on supply chain resilience, also broadly resilience of organizations. I realize that resilience is also important for us as a human being. Most likely we all have a resilience system regardless of we know it or not.
In this three decades of life, I have come across many ups and downs. Sometime I feel like many people won’t turn around from some of the situation I have faced. So, I thought about reflecting on my resilience system, that is, what drives me to get back from failures? As an academic, it is also very important as we are constantly criticized for our works by colleagues, peers, students and the community in general. When we submit an article to a journal, the null hypothesis is hard to reject, that is, the manuscript will not be accepted.
Anyway, I realized that movies play a big role in my life. Usually, when I feel down (a 3 to 6 months cycle), I would watch these three moves (may not be in the same order as listed though): (1) “A beautiful mind”, (2) “3-Idiots” and (3) “Wanted”. So, today I thought myself, why do I watch these movies? I have watched more than 1000 movies in so far but why do I watch these three movies when I need motivation. Being a researcher, it has become my job to ask “why” and “how” more or less in everything.
I realized that the first movie helps me to keep trust in my ideas, line of thought, and in general myself. Let me give you an example. While working on my master thesis in 2015, I was using ARIMA models to forecast container freight rates. However, when forecasting the unknown future based on the trained ARIMA model, I was getting more or less straight line forecast values. But in reality, the values fluctuate. I could settle down for ARIMA model for the master thesis as I was good enough but I believed that I can model the fluctuations as well. Although I tool considerably huge amount of time and effort, I figured that extracting ARIMA error terms and then applying ARCH on that and then combining both captures the fluctuations pretty well. Of course now I know more approached to this, but at that time I spent 2 months on simulations just by believing the idea that I can model it better.
The second movie, reminds me that I do not need social acceptance for doing good. I can do good and nobody needs to know.
The third one, reminds me that just by believing something we make it happen. Have you heard people visiting fortune teller and that after sometime the fortune teller’s word come true? I believe that people make it happen themselves just by believing that this is their future. It is no magic!
I have been using academic life examples in this post as I assume if anyone is reading this, most likely a graduate student or a researcher. Anyways, my most favorite movie of lifetime is “Forest Gump”, it taught me being persistent in life and that we can be good at anything if we put enough effort.