Sunday, April 6, 2014

Good Ole Advice From How I Met Your Mother


After nine seasons, the popular CBS sitcom, "How I Met Your Mother" (2005 - 2014) has finally come to an end. I have been following the series since I was in Lower Secondary and now I am in my final year of college, so it is a time to be nostalgic. Regardless of whether you liked the finale chosen by the creators Bays and Thomas or not, what is clear is the five friends, Ted, Marshall, Lily, Robin and Barney have shared lots of advice that mean a lot in life.

Some of the advice include:

A) You will know when your soul mate steps into your life:
"When you meet the right person, you know it. You can't stop thinking about them. They are your best friend and your soul mate. You can't wait to spend the rest of your life with them. No one and nothing else can compare." – Ted Mosby

B) About the future:
"Because sometimes even if you know how something's gonna end, that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the ride." – Ted Mosby

C) How long does it take to contact someone just so you don't seem desperate
"The three day rule is a childish, manipulative mind game. But yeah, you wait three days." – Lily Aldrin

D) About the importance of preserving relationships:
"You will be shocked when you discover how easy it is in life to part ways with people forever. That's why when you find someone you want to keep around, you do something about it." - Ted Mosby

E) How much love overcomes perfection:
"Here's the secret, kids. None of us can vow to be perfect. In the end all we can do is promise to love each other with everything we've got. Because love is the best thing we do." - Ted Mosby

F) The importance of friendship:
"Whatever you do in this life, it's not legendary, unless your friends are there to see it." – Barney Stinson.

G) Marriage is about tolerance and understanding, not the competition:
"If you keep lying to me, if you keep cutting me out of decisions, if you keep using words like winning and losing when you talk about our marriage? It's not like it will happen all at once, but if you keep acting this way, little by little, you're gonna lose me." – Lily Aldrin

G) How easy it is to sacrifice for true love:
"Being in a couple is hard. And committing, making sacrifices, it's hard. But if it's the right person, then it's easy. Looking at that girl and knowing she's all you really want out of life? That should be the easiest thing in the world." – Marshall Eriksen

H) When you're good to others people, other people will help you:
"When you believe in people, people come through." – Marshall Eriksen

I) The importance of not letting sadness take over you:
"When I get sad, I stop being sad, and be awesome instead" – Barney Stinson

J) Better to learn from mistakes then never doing anything risky out fear of doing mistakes:
"OK, yes it's a mistake. I know it's a mistake, but there are certain things in life where you know it's a mistake but you don't really know it's a mistake because the only way to really know it's a mistake is to make the mistake and look back and say 'yep, that was a mistake.' So really, the bigger mistake would be to not make the mistake, because then you'd go your whole life not knowing if something is a mistake or not." – Lily Aldrin

K) Life will be so much more beautiful if you let go of the past and just move on:
"Kids, you may think your only choices are to swallow your anger or throw it in someone's face. There's a third option: You can just let it go, and only when you do that is it really gone and you can move forward. And that kids, was the perfect ending to a perfect love story. It just wasn't mine. Mine was still out there, waiting for me..." – Ted Mosby

"We're going to get older whether we like it or not. So the only question is whether we want to get on with our lives or desperately cling to the past." – Ted Mosby

L) Forget all the negativity and focus only on the positives:
"You wrote down all these things to say goodbye to, but so many of them are good things. Why not just say goodbye to the bad things? Say goodbye to all the times you felt lost. To all the times it was a 'no' instead of a 'yes.' To all the scrapes and bruises. To all the heartache. Say goodbye to everything you really want to do for the last time. The good things will always be here waiting for you." – Lily Aldrin

M) Take time to sleep and relax when it is time:
"Nothing good happens after 2am." – Ted Mosby

N) Never be afraid to take risks
"The future is scary. But you can't just run back to the past because it's familiar. Yes, it's tempting. But it's a mistake." - Ted Mosby

"Doesn't being scared let you know that you're on to something important? Yeah, I mean if you're not scared you're not taking chances and if you're not taking chances then what the hell are you doing?" – Ted Mosby

O) Everything happens for a reason:
"Sometimes things have to fall apart to make way for better things." - Ted Mosby

P) Loosing touch with the people that once meant the world to you:
"The friends, neighbours, buddies and partners in crime you love so much when you're young... as the years go by, you just loose touch." - Ted Mosby