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I recently attended the On Demand (OD) entertainment launch by Astro and was looking at the collection of TV shows and movies they have available to stream or to download. One of them was Inception.
Inception is one of my favourite movies of all time. Great movies are ones that impact you in the way that you can’t forget even after you walk out of the cinema. I remember walking out and digesting everything that I had just watched in the past few hours. Then I remember pinching myself and wondering if I was still in a dream.
So out of interest I started reading up on some Inception trivia and came across this article when I learned a few really interesting things that I thought applied to us in life and in business. Generally.
Here’s what what I never knew about the film and my lessons from it.
What we never knew 1:
NOLAN DIDN’T RESEARCH DREAMS WHILE WRITING THE SCREENPLAY.
He took a similar approach to writing a movie about dreams as he did to writing Memento, a movie about memory. He primarily used his own experiences and feelings rather than outside information. “I think a lot of what I find you want to do with research is just confirming things you want to do,” he told Collider. “If the research contradicts what you want to do, you tend to go ahead and do it anyway. So at a certain point I realized that if you’re trying to reach an audience, being as subjective as possible and really trying to write from something genuine is the way to go. Really it’s mostly from my own process, my own experience.”
Lesson learned:
When I first came up with the business plan for Nuffnang, I came up with the whole 9 yards. We had a plan, cost structures and a financial model with all sorts of assumptions that could predict our growth. I spent months doing research on this business plan to make sure that I had covered everything until Ming finally told me that we had done enough research. It was time to take the plunge.
We took the plunge and guess what… what turned out for Nuffnang was nothing like the business plan I created. We can plan all we want but business is about adapting to the challenges reality throws at us.
We are brought up to believe that we should research everything we do before we do it. We research extensively which university to apply to, what course to study, even what job to take. People tell us to do our homework… but not often do people tell us that we’ve done enough homework and it’s time to take the plunge. After all, as Christopher Nolan pointed out the main motivation of our research is really to confirm what we want to do.
Even if the research tells us it’s wrong, we often go for it anyway because we often follow our heart (or gut). We are often faced with a decision on whether to follow our heart or our minds. So far I haven’t been wrong yet for following my heart.
What we never knew 2:
THE CASTING DECISIONS REVOLVED AROUND DICAPRIO.
Nolan knew that he wanted Leonardo DiCaprio for the role of Cobb, so according to him, “We were just trying to cast the best people I could find for those parts, who felt right around Leo.” This also involved casting a young ensemble because Nolan “wanted to get a young, energetic cast around him who wouldn’t make [DiCaprio] look younger.”
Lesson learned:
As a company grows, its business is managed not just by one team but a number of teams, creating a natural hierarchy. The job of an entrepreneur or a CEO is to pick the right people to lead each team. That’s it. The lead will then tell you what kind of people he needs under his team and it’s the CEO’s job to find him the right people that he needs so he can do his thing.
In the past I’ve often made this mistake. I overreached and picked the people in the team of my own managers based on who I think is the right person for the job not based on who my manager thinks he or she can work well with. Having learned that, I now find out what kind of people my managers need, I give my input but I let them have the final say.
What we never knew 3:
NOLAN FINISHED BOTH EARLY AND UNDER BUDGET.
He actually prefers the constraints that time and money give him, so he makes a serious effort to be efficient when it comes to filmmaking.
Lesson learned:
I’ve met a lot of successful people in my life and they all share one thing in common. They have never once complained about their circumstance. About not having enough money or not having enough resources. They make do with what they have and just like Nolan, having limited resources forces them to be more efficient and creative.
Successful people tend to focus on how to make things happen with what they have. Unsuccessful people tend to complain about the cards they’re dealt and how they just never had enough to achieve what they needed to achieve.
If you’re looking to stream OR download Inception to watch legally you can get them from OD Plus for RM15.90 a month. Along with a lot of other movies like The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and TV shows like The Flash or The Big Bang Theory.
If you want to watch really new movies (like released in the cinema this year kind of new), you can select and pay for individual titles at the OD Store from as low as RM5.30. Movies you can get here are like Inside Out, The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Fast & Furious 7.
Or if your pocket has recently been hit by the rise in toll rates you can choose from a library of virtually unlimited FREE on demand content, including Same Day as The U.S. titles, the latest seasons of Akademi Fantasia, Super Spontan and many more for free with OD Free. There you can watch TV shows like Game of Thrones, Empire, Quantico, Heroes Reborn, The Walking Dead, Marvel’s Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D and lots of local content like Akademi Fantasia.
If you have Astro on the Go you can also use the new Download feature to download content on to your device (from your Wi-Fi) and watch it offline. So you can carry your movies on to a plane or whenever you don’t have an internet connection. This is a first in Malaysia.
Connect your PVRs to your home Wi-Fi before 31st Jan 2016 and you’ll get 3 months free access to OD Plus’s content (worth RM47.70). To learn more about ODjust go to www.watchOD.com and follow the instructions.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space