What We Can We Learn From The Lion King

I’m the kind of guy who likes to watch cartoons. I love them because they are so easy to watch and given the unoriginality in Hollywood today, cartoons might just be the thing that saves me. It’s interesting how you can rewatch some of the cartoons we enjoyed as children and suddenly you understand them differently, now that you’ve been adulting for a while, you can understand the adult that wrote that cartoon… you get where they were coming from.

This happened to me when I was rewatching the lion king (the original and not the remake, that movie should never have happened). As a child, I enjoyed the Lion King, I watched it over and over again and yes, I knew every word. But the underlying message totally missed me because I was naive to the ways of the world. The story is so powerful that if you don’t pay attention you can miss it. It’s a true testament to storytelling that this story can be relevant 26 years after it’s premiere.

For those who have never watched the lion king ( it recently came to my attention that there are in fact people that have never watched it), the story follows a lion called Simba who is the child of a king and next in line to the throne, Simba’s dad is killed by his jealous uncle and the uncle blames it all on Simba. Ashamed of what he “did” Simba leaves town, meets two hippies called Timon and Pumba, and hangs out with them for a few years, living the life yet at home things have taken a turn for the worst. Simba is found by his childhood girlfriend and she tells him what his uncle has done. Long story short Simba goes back home, challenges and defeats his uncle, and takes back the throne. That’s just the outline of the story.

All through this story 2 themes stand out for me and I just want to unpack them in this article here and they are; identity and friendship.

Identity

All his life Simba is told one singular thing by his father, you’re my son. Obviously, his dad is a king so it means something when he says “you’re my son” So after a series of “mistakes”, he tries to run from his past and he doesn’t heal from it, as such, he sort of give up and settles for the life that’s less than what he was meant to be. He settles for a life where he eats bugs (that can’t sustain him) from under a tree… like how low can one go?

So we have a lion, a king with so much potential and he’s eating bugs from under a tree and he’s fine with it… because he has made a couple of “mistakes” and he’s too afraid to do anything about it.

I put “mistake” in quotes because Simba wasn’t the architect of what happened to him. But in real life, sometimes we are the architects of things that bring us pain. We make wrong decisions which isn’t a bad thing, it’s human to make mistakes there is no problem with being human. But what we do with those mistakes matter, do we learn from them, or do we sweep them under the metaphorical rug and keep going.

I believe that the actions we make in the past have the power to make us settle for mediocrity, giving up our purpose, and calling because we are too afraid to go out and try again. We settle for bugs under a fallen tree trunk, they might be able to sustain us, but they won’t make us grow.

One of my favorite lines in that movie is when Mufasa says to Simba “ look at yourself Simba, you’re more than what you have become”… You’re more than that Job that you’ve decided to settle in, you’re more than that relationship, you’re more than what you’ve come to believe of yourself because a couple of people told you you weren’t good enough because you didn’t meet their standards of perfection. You’re more than what your past mistakes have come to make you believe about yourself.

There is a song called thrive by a band called casting crowns and there is a line that goes “we were made for so much more than ordinary lives, we meant to thrive!” Don’t let your identity get lost in your past mistakes and failures… don’t be afraid to thrive.

This brings me to my next point of discussion.

Friendship

At his lowest point in life, Simba meets Timon and Pumba who turn out to be the most loveable characters in the entire movie. But maybe they weren’t what he needed at that point here’s why.

When you look at Timon and Pumba, they were okay with being low profile, being average, not facing up to their problems… I mean that’s why they are at Hakuna Matata, a place where they aren’t judged or criticized.

At first glance, this might seem like the ideal place to be but when you think about it, when you step out and start making big moves it’s when the critics come out. People don’t like Jeff Bezos cause he has a ridiculous amount of money that keeps growing. If he decided to be in a place where he isn’t Judged he wouldn’t be where he is right now!

Timon and Pumba are in a place of comfort and I’ve got news for you, growth and comfort can’t co-exist they are like oil and water; You can’t grow in comfort.

But how does this fit into the whole idea of friendship? Someone once said “You’re a product of your first 5 friends” so, if you surround yourself with people who like to be average, it rubs off on you. Simba is a king and he chooses to be a nobody because the two people he spends most of his time with are okay with being nobodies.

Final thoughts

I originally wanted this blog to be solely about identity but I believe it’s almost impossible to look at identity without considering our past circumstances and the environment around us — which includes the people we spend most of our time with. To quote Rafiki “the past does hurt… you can either run from it or learn from it” we need more friends like Rafiki, the ones who ask us the hard stuff… have the hard conversations with us. Those are the ones that help us become better people, the people we were meant to be.