How to Break from the Norm | Breaking Bad HD

Society gives us a default track: Go to school, go to college, get a job in an organization or corporation, get married, have kids, retire. There’s nothing wrong with this track if you choose it. But too many people simply live it because they are too afraid to choose anything else. People live to minimize the downside instead of maximize the upside. This is part of our human survival instinct. People often live their fears instead of their desires, the “what if” over the “why the hell not”. “I have spent my whole life scared, frightened of things that could happen, might happen, might not happen, 50-years I spent like that. Finding myself awake at three in the morning. But you know what? Ever since my diagnosis, I sleep just fine. What I came to realize is that fear, that’s the worst of it. That’s the real enemy. So, get up, get out in the real world and you kick that bastard as hard you can right in the teeth.” — Walter White After breaking from the default track, Walter White confronted conflict. Society doesn’t like it when you break from the norm because it questions the norm. It’s easier to believe life is a series of steps to complain about: A-B-C. But if someone decides to do A-C-B and then succeeds, then people who lived A-B-C start to question their path and might feel a tinge of jealousy and regret that they were either too afraid or too ignorant to do A-C-B. For the first 50 years of Walter White’s life he was a passive observer mindlessly going through the motions of what he was “supposed to do”. It took a life threatening illness to make him snap out of it and fully embrace life as an active participant. In the face of death, “what if” doesn’t matter. One starts to live out the “why the hell not” by jumping out of planes, seeing exotic places, reconnecting with old friends and family, but why wait to hear we’re going to die before we start to live? For Walter White though, he didn’t just switch up the A-B-C. He took it to a whole new level… the B-A-D. Upon learning that one of his former students was recently involved in a D.E.A. bust, Walter White looks up the student’s home address and goes to his house. Jesse: You — wanna cook crystal meth?! Walt: Either that, or I turn you in. Walter White didn’t give Jesse a choice, but for the first time Walter White made a choice, a questionable one indeed, but a choice nonetheless: He will cook crystal meth. Jesse wants to know why his former teacher would do such an outlandish thing… At first Walt claims it’s about the money. Jesse: Nah. Come on, man! Someone straight like you, giant stick up his ass all of a sudden at age, what, fifty, your just gonna break bad? Walt stares at Jesse for a long time, considers how to answer. Walt: I am awake. Whether you decide to stick with the norms or break from them… you do have a choice. There are those who complain about how life happens to them; And then there are those who believe they happen to life! Or as Walter Whi