Module 6- Part 2: Your Mission, should you choose to accept it…
Benji
Your Mission, should you choose to accept it…
Ethan Hunt, legendary IMF agent, is in a spot of bother.
(and that’s putting it lightly.)
His team is inside the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, frantically trying to piece together a plan to save the world from impending doom.
On the way to the hotel is an agent for a Swedish-born nuclear strategist looking to incite conflict between the US and Russia.
He’s aiming to negotiate the sale of nuclear launch codes with an assassin (who previously retrieved said launch codes from another IMF agent with lethal force).
Ethan’s job is to make the agent THINK he’s meeting the assassin, while simultaneously making the assassin THINK she’s meeting the agent.
To do this, he needs to gain control over the elevators, security cameras, and more—all of which require hacking into the skyscraper’s system.
However, there’s a problem…
The ‘techie’ (who, funnily enough, is called Benji) can’t crack the code in the short space of time they have.
The only option is to get to the physical servers, located higher up the Skyscraper.
And the only way to get there…is from the ‘outside.’
So naturally, Ethan Hunt suits up and starts free climbing the Burj Khalifa, with the aid of nothing but a pair of ‘super sticky’ gloves.
What follows is, of course, one of the most iconic action scenes in modern cinema, found in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.
And while there’s plenty more to the film than just this scene, I’ll let you have fun discovering that yourself.
I just want to focus on this moment.
The first time I watched Tom Cruise (who plays Ethan) climbing the side of this building—so high it’s dizzying to watch from all the way behind a screen—I was struck by how beautiful the Burj Khalifa is.
Now, all skyscrapers are impressive, but this building has a certain ‘unconventional’ look to it that is absolutely breathtaking.
In fact, when I started trying to list my favorite skyscrapers, I found that a great number of them had that attribute in common:
They’re unconventional.
Taipei 101, the Chrysler Building, the Evolution Tower, the Burj Khalifa, and THESE ones located in Marina Bay Sands…
Well, isn’t that a nifty way of coming full circle?
Like these skyscrapers, some of the greatest uses of the memorized deck are the most ‘unconventional.’
Now, let me make something clear:
The architects that made these beautiful skyscrapers didn’t just wake up one day and decide to go wild while building. They studied for years and learned how to build ‘conventional’ skyscrapers first (and actually built them!)
That’s important:
We can only truly be unconventional, once we’ve mastered ‘convention.’
We can only break the rules, once we’ve learned, internalized, and performed by them.
But the good news is that, if you’ve done this in the order we advised—you’re well on your way to that. We’ve covered many of the fundamentals, many of the ‘conventions’ that you need to understand.
If you still feel ‘unsure’ about any of the previous modules, I highly advise you to go back and review them before moving on.
We need a solid foundation to build on if we’re going to try to be unconventional.
You feel ready?
Great.
Here’s what we have lined up.
In the Live Session, I walk Jacob through what this kind of unconventional thinking might look like in action—and how we come up with these ideas.
I think there’s a lot of value in watching this unfold with no knowledge of what’s going to happen beforehand, and I don’t want to spoil the surprise, so make sure you read the next section on the theory behind this, then watch the session and THEN read the rest of this section.
I’ll see you then…