If you’re paying attention to the world around you, it becomes pretty clear pretty
fast that nobody’s perfect. Our leaders, our businessmen, our athletes, even the
characters on screen who count as our brightest lights are carrying around enough
bad habits to make Duke Nukem go rosey. So Tiger Woods stuck it in anything
with two feet and a wonder bra, he’s also, thanks to an extreme work ethic and
dedication, the best virtuoso golfer in the universe. General Petraeus had one or two
affairs after a lifetime of service and reigning in the biggest gong show in the world,
Wesley Snipes may have cheated on his taxes, but Major League was pretty funny.
But that’s the problem, the world doesn’t seem to understand a man can have
qualities worthy of emulation despite his vices (however slight or serious). The
other problem is what lead these guys to pretend they were perfect in the first place.
Why sanitize this stuff? Who is it good for? We shouldn’t strive towards perfection,
we should strive towards improvement. It’s always possible and you’ll be heading in
the same direction anyway.
Daniel Craig’s incarnation of James Bond wears his vices on his sleeve. He’s
brooding, an borderline alcoholic, a murderer many times over and even if you were
his best friend he’d probably sleep with your mom, sister and girlfriend the second
you left the room to pull some hor dourves from the oven.
Lucky for us, we rational men are blessed with the ability to cherrypick the
strengths and traits we want to cultivate in ourselves, while passing on the crazy
parts that would likely land us in jail forever or on the business end of an honour
killing.
So in the spirit of Skyfall, the movie everybody has apparently already seen three
times, we bring you the Do’s and Don’ts of England’s coolest spy.
DO: Take care of yourself. For every hour Bond spends moping, drinking and
shooting, he spends two at the gym pounding out the free weights. His predecessors
proved that you don’t have to have an Atlas body to get the girl (looking at you
Pierce), but when the protagonist coming out of the ocean outshines every Bond girl
ever, you know you’re doing something right.
DO NOT: Dick over your friends. James is so dead set on catching the cats
responsible for his double crossing Vesper Lynd, that he tags his pal Mathis with a
taser in his own house and gets him sent to wherever they torture English secret
prisoners nowadays. You don’t have to trust everybody, but you have to trust
somebody, or you’ll be miserable.
DO: Dress Well. The first thought on Bond’s mind when he jumps from one burning,
exploding train car to safefy is to straighten his suit. Why? Because he still has
things to do, and when you look sharp, everything else comes a little easier. If you’re
gonna make it, make it look good.
DO NOT: Be violent. Your bones would be ground to a fine powder after half the
sustained beating any Bond takes in any of his movies. We’re not built for it and
when it’s absolutely necessary it shouldn’t be glorified as anything more than it
is. Scrapping looks awesome on camera, but in real life, in the parking lot outside
the movie theatre for instance, you just look like a bunch of drunks dropping their
IQs one punch at a time. This goes so much more for playing with guns. Bullets
are notoriously difficult to dodge. Most of the time, when professional soldiers are
shooting at you, you get shot.
DO: Be the best at your job. Any job worth doing is worth doing well, and James
Bond is very good at being an agent. He’s “M”’s go-to fella when it comes to mopping
up messes, he’s efficient and tenacious at getting his job done, and we’ve yet to see
him ultimately fail at anything. JB isn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty and he’s not
hung up on getting recognition from his co-workers, in fact he’s not keen on them at
all, (except that one new kid in R&D).
DO NOT: Sleep with every single woman you meet. There’s nothing wrong with sex,
certainly there’s nothing wrong with having a long list of sexual partners, but it’s a
real dumb idea to look at the world like it was a meat market. You’ll always do much
better in life when you can approach 50% of the people you meet without working
out a way to undress them, and discretion is always the better part of valor.
