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I am so not a football fan. Really not a sports fan in general. But I was extremely excited to see the Super Bowl this past February because of the halftime show. All the rap artists featured, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Fifty Cent, Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre, and Eminem, they made songs I loved to dance to, get hyped to, and blast in my car radio on road trips. You probably wouldn’t guess it to look at us, but both Robert and I are big fans of rap and basically always have been.
Eminem’s classic song Lose Yourself, which won an Oscar for best original song, is one of my all-time favorites. The song is all about facing your fears, getting inspired, and changing your life. These are the same themes we see in Eight Mile, the semi-autobiographical story of Marshall Mathers’ life and his life just before his rise to fame as Eminem.
The movie has some downfalls – as does Eminem himself. His misogyny rears its head in both his songs and in the movie. And there are some definite anger issues on display. But I try not to let those problems ruin the message for me, because ultimately Eight Mile is just downright inspiring. It’s motivating. It makes you want to get out in the world and make something, do something, chase your dreams. It tells you to quit daydreaming about what might happen if you hit it big, and start day-doing things to actually give yourself a shot at getting there.
The movie highlights a dangerous trap that so many of us fall into: we fear failure or rejection, so we never actually take any steps that might risk those things. And, of course, as both Wayne Gretzky and my eleven-year-old niece recently reminded me: we miss 100% of the shots we don’t take. So we end up never risking anything. Because it’s easier to sit around just shooting the breeze with your buddies about what life would be like if you did succeed. It’s easier to talk. It’s easier to just think about success than to work towards making it a reality.
In the movie, that’s exactly what Eminem is facing. His friends love to think about the future (one of the characters is even named Future!). And that’s so understandable because their reality is harsh. As Eminem says in the movie at one point, they’re all “still broke as f*%# and live at home with their moms.” It’s easy to see why someone would want to just slip away and think about a different life. But ultimately, Eminem’s character comes to understand that he’s using this escapist fantasy as a replacement for the real, scary work of putting himself out there and risking rejection.
And at the end of the film, we see Eminem say no to celebrating with his friends, even though he’s just shown off his skills in an impressive way and won a local rap battle, because he needs to go back to work at the car-part stamping factory. He’s doing the unsexy, totally unglamorous, tedious work of stamping car parts because he wants financial stability. He wants to earn enough to buy studio time instead of waiting for someone else to give it to him for free. He wants to take control of his life.
And if Eminem walking off into the night to stamp car parts (while you just know he’s writing raps in his head), and we hear his hit song Lose Yourself slowly fade in as the screen rolls the credits … if that doesn’t get you completely amped to go chase your own dreams, I don’t know what will. It’s so cool to see people digging in and doing the difficult work of building a fantasy into a reality.
So whatever dream you’re working towards, take a step. Today. If you want to write raps or poems or a novel or draw comics or illustrate children’s books … get our your pencil. If you want to do stand-up comedy, book a slot at a local club. If you want to make movies, get out your damn phone, which probably has a better camera than what Hitchcock worked with, and make a movie. If you want to reach financial independence, sit down and make a budget. Set up auto-investing. Research index funds and find out how to make money in the stock market as an average person. If you want to get in shape, get down on the floor and do some push-ups, sit-ups, and tie up those laces and hit the pavement. Just make a damn move. Take your first step. You’ll never have that feeling of losing yourself in your passion if you don’t.