We've been brainwashed into swallowing hook-line-and-sinker the spurious beer-commercial dictum that "enjoyment" is the yardstick by which we should measure the worthiness of any endeavor -- that anything worth doing must also by definition be "fun." Our standards of what we expect from ourselves have eroded. We've been MTV-ed and Nintendo-ed into oblivion, narcotized into junkiedom by the Home Shopping Network. Our icons are no longer the achievers of this world -- the Einsteins, the Schweitzers, the Lindberghs...

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Life doesn't come with a "fun warranty." We aren't issued E-tickets when we're born. Life is what we make of it, and the saddest loss is not to explore your potential within the short time you're given.

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f this is beginning to resemble an inspirational sermon, there's a reason. Having now done a fair number of talks at colleges and universities, I've begun to realize that the one thing they don't teach in film school is how to believe in yourself.

-- Frank Darabont on making the Shawshank Redemption