Posted by How to train your dragon is a story about a failed viking.
When people think of vikings, they’ll usually think tall, strong, blond hair, loud, rough. At least I do. And in the case of this movie, they even kill dragons. Well, the main character of this story, Hiccup, is none of that. The son of the tribe’s leader is a small guy, with barely any strength and not rough at all. But, he is very creative and observant, something the other vikings have lost in the heat of battle. The first thing you see is how he creates some kind of device to hit dragons faster and from a considerable distance. Guess what, he is the first one ever to hit the elusive Night Fury, a legendary dragon.
After finding the fallen dragon, he notices it can’t fly and starts designing a new prosthetic to help him. He manages to attach it to the dragon and they both start flying and, of course, become friends. Because who doesn’t like having someone on your back controlling you? But he won’t stop there. Through trial and error he starts perfecting his dragon-controlling-prosthetic. In the process he learns a lot about dragons, just because he doesn’t see them as enemies anymore. Eventually the tribe discovers him and the dragon and try to use Toothless, how Hiccup called his draconic friend, to find the dragons nest. When the older vikings try to beat the leader dragon and fail, Hiccup appears with his classmates riding dragons to save the day. After reuniting back with Toothless and beating the dragon leader, all vikings return home seeing dragons from a new perspective, as pets.
Out of all the things the movie could teach me, these three hit me the hardest.
Be Yourself
Hiccup was always himself. He didn’t have the physical strength of all the other vikings, not even the girls. But he was very creative. He found new ways of fighting dragons. And even if nobody understood, he kept working on it. And that brought him his first success. Even when training to be like the other vikings, he kept working on what he believed in. He would always beat the challenges with his own methods and he understood that dragons don’t have to be enemies. If you can understand them, they can work with you.
Most people will walk the same path and there’s nothing wrong with that. And you’ll probably walk the same path as a lot of people at some point. But there are circumstances where you have to be yourself and defend what you believe in. Times will come when you have to break the pattern and walk your own way. Being yourself is the only way to get other people to genuinely appreciate and understand you. All the time Hiccup tried to be like the other vikings, he was seen as a failure. The moment he started doing things his own way, he started being successful and people started noticing and praising him.
Work Hard
As the phrase goes, “easy comes, easy goes.” Nothing worth keeping comes without effort. In How to train your dragon, Hiccups didn’t achieve what he did by mere luck. He was working very hard even before the movie started. With what vikings knew of engineering, how many people would have created the machine with which he got Toothless out of the sky? Not a lot. He had probably been working very hard for a long time. After discovering Toothless and thinking of his prosthetic, he worked even harder. It was hard enough to think of and build all the things he did. Imagine having to do all that without people noticing. Even in the movie, melting metals doesn’t seem an easy task. Then trying them on the dragon, just to fail and have to keep working the next day.
While his classmates were sleeping, eating, killing stuff or some other viking pastime, Hiccups was hard at work. He had to sacrifice lots of things to focus on his project and achieve what he did. The friendships he could have gotten by fitting in the group, the feeling of being the weird one in town. But it was all worth it. He was working hard on what he believed in and it paid off. In the end he evolved his entire tribe by learning to train and ride his pet dragon. I don’t think this one needs any more translation than it has, find something you really believe in and work hard as f*ck.
Have an Open Mind
As mentioned in the movie, there had been around seven generations of vikings in that town. That’s over a hundred years. Imagine all the people that is. And they all saw dragons as enemies, devils they had to defeat. They even based their rite of passage on killing dragons. Born in that society, it must be really hard to see the creatures as something else.
Then you have Hiccups, he always saw everything in an alternate way. He saw different methods of approaching fights against the dragons. And as soon as he got close to one of them, he “saw himself in it” as he says in the movie. It was not because the dragon did anything different than all other dragons did. It was because Hiccup had a mind open to possibilities. Dragons don’t have to be bad. And turns out they weren’t. By being observant and seeing colors other than black and white. He could think of what nobody had thought before. Riding a dragon, befriending it and “defeating” the rest by understanding them and giving them what they liked, no viking ever thought of that.
There are no real fire-breathing dragons in our world. That I know of. But there certainly are metaphorical ones. In pretty much every circumstance you are faced with, you will have choices. We are programmed to think first of ourselves and what we want. But how different would life be if we stopped for a second and tried to think of even one more possibility. Doing the exercise of trying to think what the other side wants, or maybe even the person at our right or left. It will be hard at first, and probably after a while. But when we get it, it’s like a door to another dimension has opened. From then on, we will start seeing the world as colorful as it can be. We will be able to understand what other people want and even get them to understand us better.
How to train your dragon looks like a kids movie. Maybe because it is. It’s a movie about a guy who failed to be a viking but became the first dragon trainer and a legend. There’s a lot you can get out of it, for me it was to be myself, work hard and have a mind open to new possibilities.