One of my favorite movies (despite the cheesiness) is Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium. There's a lot of really great lessons in it. One of the characters, Mahoney, feels stuck. Her boss, and mentor, gives her what he calls, a congreve cube. Mahoney insists it is just a block of wood. Her boss asks her what she thinks she could do with it. "I'm sure I could think of a million things to do with a block of wood," she says. "Of course there are a million things you could do with a block of wood, Mahoney, but what do you think would happen, if someone, just once, believed in it."
Of course this confused me the first time I watched it, and Mahoney too, until the end of the movie. Her friend, the "mutant" (accountant) is a disbeliever of magic through the whole movie until right at the end. He says, "Now...I believe that you can make it be anything that you want. It's you. You...are a block of wood."
She then proceeds to make all sorts of magic happen. For the first time, I am seriously considering grad school. I didn't think I was cut out for it. How could I be? But just two days ago, one of my professors, whom I greatly admire told me that I would do very well. He said he would write me a letter of recommendation, and he doesn't do that for anyone. Today he told me that he knows I would do so well, that if I wanted to stay here for grad school, he would fight for me to have a tuition waiver AND a paid assistantship. I am a block of wood. Someone believes in me, and I actually feel like maybe I could do some really great things. "What Mahoney needed was the opportunity to prove to herself that she was something more than she believed."
And that's what I need.
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