FLORIDA, September 1, 2012 — Romance is of
tremendous importance to any given James Bond story. What can men learn
from the unique relationship between Bond and the opposite gender?
Planning for the future is an extremely important thing.
However, Bond does appear to live in the moment. Is there any way of
finding a balanced center which emphasizes both wisdom and excitement?
In living the Bond lifestyle, is it more important to own
things, or rather experience them? Above all else, is personal
confidence the essence of James Bond? If not, then what might be?
In this second and final part of our discussion, Paul
Kyriazi, who has educated men across the world about the Bond
philosophy, will answer all of these questions and tell us a bit about
his life and career.
****
Joseph F. Cotto: Romance is of
tremendous importance to any given Bond story. What can men learn from
the unique relationship between Bond and the opposite gender?
Paul Kyriazi: We know that James Bond
enjoys women, but you’ve never seen him try to change any woman. Bond
has no pre-conceived idea of what a woman should be. He takes each
woman, even a villainess, at face value and lets her be herself. Bond’s
attractive power with women is that he is on a mission. He has a
purpose, he’s not “hanging out“, and it’s a positive purpose of trying to save the world from destruction.
Bond seldom chases the woman. He let’s the woman approach
him. The actor George Hamilton, who has a reputation as a “ladies man”
summed it up perfectly when he said, “I’ve never forced the issue of
sexual involvement. Women make that decision. And as long as you make
them feel comfortable, you’ll arrive there quicker than guys breathing
down their neck.” James Bond never ‘breathes down their neck”.
In my James Bond Lifestyle seminar, I teach ‘The Ultimate Secret of Women’. And many women have told me, “Paul, you’ve hit the nail on the head with that one.” The ‘secret’ is; ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’
just like the Cindi Lauper record. Of course, they first want love,
respect and security, and most men will give them that. But what men
often forget is that women also want ‘fun’.
So the man has to be the ‘director of fun’ and plan
outings that the woman can enjoy. You know that James Bond would never
sit home with his woman and watch three football games in a row. He’d be
taking her to a luxury resort and saying things like, “Don’t bother to
pack. Just bring your passport and we’ll buy what we need on the way.”
Cotto: Planning for the future is an
extremely important thing. However, Bond does seem to live in the
moment. Is there any way of finding a balanced center which emphasizes
both wisdom and excitement?
Kyriazi: When he’s on a mission, James Bond
certainly must live in the moment. He has to navigate the challenges
that come to him as he proceeds to stop whatever evil he’s up against.
When he is off duty, such as you see him lying in a small boat on the
river with his girl of the moment Sylvia Trench, he is certainly relaxed
with no plans except for the next few moments. The age old choice of
the “wisdom of security” versus the “excitement of risk” seems not to
concern Bond.
We often see him concentrated when it gets down to the final
countdown on a mission, but we almost never see him afraid. Eliminating
as much fear from our minds is upmost if we want to emulate 007 and
have an exciting life. Yet, notice that Bond carried 50 gold sovereigns
in his briefcase for back-up, valued at $19,000. (One full sovereign =
1/4 oz.) Gold can get us out of more dangerous situations than a Walther
PPK.
Cotto: Despite being a man of refined
taste, Bond does not seem to own many of the finer things. From stays in
tropical resorts to refurbished Aston Martins, these are typically paid
for by the British government. In living the Bond lifestyle, is it more
important to actually own things, or rather experience them?
Kyriazi: Your question has struck to the very heart of living the James Bond Lifestyle. ‘Lifestyle’ leans more to the ‘livingness‘ side of life, than to the ‘ownership‘ side. We can live like James Bond if we think of ‘living‘, not ‘ownership‘. So, for example, instead of buying a second house, we can start taking ‘mental ownership’ of hotels as our second homes. It’s cheaper to do and we can have ‘second homes’ all around the world, just by using hotels.
And just think, you don’t have to clean up the place and carry in boxes of bed sheets, soap and shampoo. Your ‘second homes’ will have all that waiting for you when you check in. As 007 says in ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ when he is shown to his first class hotel room, “This will do. This will do me nicely.”
Cotto: Above all else, is personal confidence the essence of James Bond? If not, then what do you think might be?
Kyriazi: James Bond certainly did not have
confidence when he was trying to disarm Goldfinger’s nuclear device in
Ft. Knox. He was really sweating out the countdown until an expert
showed up to turn it off. In ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’
at the ice rink, surrounded by killers, Bond was at a complete loss of
what to do and worried. It took his girlfriend Tracy to get him out of
danger.
Confidence is not the essence of 007, perseverance is. No
matter what, James Bond keeps going. He may have great setbacks, get
beat up and tortured, but he never breaths a word about giving up. He
perseveres to the end.
Without perseverance, no mission is accomplished. The
attributes of confidence, intelligence, talent and education can help,
but without perseverance James Bond would have been killed by Oddjob
long before the bomb exploded making all that gold radioactive.
Cotto: Now that our discussion is at
its end, many readers are probably wondering how you not only came to be
a noted writer about the Bond philosophy, but a figure in the
entertainment industry. Tell us a bit about your life and career.
Kyriazi: At age 8, I saw “The Making of ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’
” on Disneyland TV and decided I wanted to make movies too. I made 16mm
action stories in film school and then on to directing independent
feature films such as ‘Omega Cop’ starring Adam West who played Batman
on TV.
In the ‘90s when independent feature films were difficult to
get financed, and I was unable to break into Hollywood movies, I turned
to making full-cast audio-books for novels I had written working with
movie stars that I loved as a little boy, such as Rod Taylor, Robert
Culp, David Hedison and George Chakiris. Even though they were in their
‘70s, they could still play leading men in my audio-books. It was a
dream that I never thought possible.
So sometimes, when you don’t get exactly where you plan to
go, if you preserve through the disappointments, you will get to a
wonderful place that you didn’t even know existed.
Having survived as a creative freelancer all my life, I
started getting questions about how I was able to do that. Since I had
always had James Bond in my mind as living a lifestyle of luxury and
adventure, I used him as an example to teach the success techniques that
I had learned from books and seminars.
In 1998, I recorded a 90 minute cassette tape called ‘How to Live the James Bond Lifestyle’.
I later expanded it into a 230 page book, and then to an eight hour
audio-book and now a 342 page Kindle book. I’m still using those ‘Bond techniques’
to get to new levels of creativity and lifestyle, so I can continue to
walk into luxury hotel rooms and say, “This will do. This will do me
nicely.”
