What Hanna Can Teach You About Focus and Commitment

Isaacs: “Did she turn out as you hoped?”
Marissa: “Better!”

This dialogue is taken from the movie Hanna, directed by Joe Wright which was out last April.

Isaacs is a mercenary hired by Marissa wiegler, a corrupt CIA agent, to capture Hannah.

But what is it all about? Who is Marissa? And why would she want to capture Hanna?

I hear you!
OK, here’s the story behind the movie Hannah in a nutshell:

Hanna is a teenage girl. Uniquely, she has the strength, the stamina, and the smarts of a soldier; these come from being raised by her father, an ex-CIA man, in the wilds of Finland. Living a life unlike any other teenager, her upbringing and training have been one and the same, all geared to making her the perfect assassin. The turning point in her adolescence is a sharp one; sent into the world by her father on a mission, Hanna journeys stealthily across Europe while eluding agents dispatched after her by a ruthless intelligence operative with secrets of her own. As she nears her ultimate target, Hanna faces startling revelations about her existence and unexpected questions about her humanity.
(source: IMDB).

You can think about Hanna as the teenage female version of Leon (the professional) or as Run Lola Run meets Kill Bill. I watched it not long ago and although it hasn’t been praised by the media, it’s the kind of movie which will keep you on the edge of your seat, if you like action thrillers and don’t mind a bit of violence and blood stains on the screen (I do actually but I had fun all the same.) The movie has got great music as well, by The Chemical Brothers, which fits the fast-paced action perfectly.

Why am I telling you about Hanna?

Well, as I’ve already mentioned, Hanna is a teenage girl who didn’t have a normal upbringing. She didn’t go out with friends to the movies on Fridays. Nor did she spend her afternoons window shopping at the mall or chatting with her friends on Facebook. She didn’t have a telly so she couldn’t watch American Idol or Lost or The Bachelor or any other TV feel-good series. In fact, when you think of it, she must have had a pretty lonely childhood.

I mean, think about it: Growing up in the freezing wilds of Finland where your best friend is your father, and the only guys you can hang out with are probably reindeer, until you hunt them…  But here’s the thing: Hanna had had a goal. All her life she’d been trained by her father to become the perfect assassin. She practiced fighting, shooting, she perfected her German as well as many other skills. She read encyclopedias and accumulated a great amount of knowledge that would serve her later on in her mission.

And when the time came for her to act, she knew exactly what to do. She was the perfect assassin.

There’s a lesson for all of us here.
No, you don’t need to live in the middle of the Arctic. You don’t need to live with your Dad either. And please don’t become assassins. Of course not. Be good human beings! Hanna is just a fairy-tale movie, after all…

But here is what Hanna can teach us all:
When we have a goal and we really want to accomplish it, we need to focus most of our energies towards that goal. I don’t care what that goal is. It takes a lot of commitment and sacrifice to achieve the success we’re after. But if we stick to our guns we will ultimately get there.

I’m going to talk about my experience for a second. My current goal is to make this blog a success. Why? Because I love writing. I love blogging. I love reading comments and replying to them. And I’ve realized that my blog is to turn into my main lead generation source.

And here’s the thing: My success is going to be in direct proportion to the amount of effort I put into . Last month I’ve been doing many other things and have been blogging once or twice a week on average. Guess what? I’ve hardly had any new leads and my traffic has taken a nosedive. But now I’m about to change it, to spend much more on the blog and to optimize it for success. Ultimately I’ll be posting 4 and 5 times a week. I will also spend much more time on driving traffic to my blog by commenting on other blogs, guest posting and more. Will I get more traffic and leads? You bet!

You can do the same, whatever your passion is. Learn from Hanna and stay committed to your goals until you succeed.

What about you?

Have you seen Hanna?

What are the movies that have influenced you?

Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

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