Karate Kid is one of my favorite movies and it also happens to be a movie with so many great life lessons in it. The movie is kind of feels like a Personal Development movie so today I wanted to talk about some of the lessons that I have learned in Karate Kid.
- Everyone can use a good mentor. Mr. Miyagi famously said There is no such thing as bad student only bad teacher. And that is true, teacher say, student do. Mr. Miyagi was an example of great teacher. Even when Daniel started to get distracted or frustrated Mr. Miyagi was able to get him focused back again. We can all use a mentor and teacher who will helps us with that in our lives.
- Either you do or you don’t. There was another great quote by Mr. Miyagi where he said Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later, [makes squish gesture] get squish just like grape. Here, karate, same thing. Either you karate do “yes”, or karate do “no”. You karate do “guess so”, [makes squish gesture] just like grape.” I see this quote as being about commitment, Mr. Miyagi wants to know if Daniel is committed about learning Karate because if he isn’t this isn’t going to work. Same thing for everything we do in our lives. We need to committed to learn something or do something or its not going to work.
- Take it one step at a time. At the scene of the beach, Daniel sees Mr. Miyagi doing the crane so he asks him if he could teach it to him, he tells him he isn’t ready and says “First learn stand, then learn fly” Basically what this means is take it one step at a time. Don’t attempt anything you are not quite ready for. Kind of like if you were playing a video game and you beat level 1 and decided to skip to the final level, would you succeed, probably not. Same thing with life, take everything one step at a time.
- Don’t fear fear. This one is actually from the 3rd one but I think it’s a great lesson. In the final fight, Daniel is hurting a lot and goes crying to Mr. Miyagi that he can’t do it and wants to quit. Miyagi tells him “Its ok to lose to opponent but must not lose to fear” In others words its ok to fail or lose but its not ok to fail just because you were afraid to do it. Because if you try and do your best, at least you’ll know and have no regrets.