For the last few months I have been cocooned under a blanket in my room glued to my phone on Netflix watching How I Met Your Mother. This obsession got to the point where I would stay in my room from the time I got home, to the time I went to bed frantically clicking on the next episode.

If you have never watched How I Met Your Mother, I will give you a brief description. The main character, Ted, is a man in his thirties trying to find the love of his life. He tells the story in 2030 to his two children of how he met his wife.

In his story, there are four other main characters, also his best friends. One of the four is Lily, an outgoing artist who has been with another character, Marshal, since the first week of college. Marshal is a lawyer with big dreams of saving the environment. There is also Robin a news reporter who doesn’t want commitment and Barney a seemingly heartless man who is in love with playing women.

These characters all have amazing adventures together. Not like slaying dragons and saving the princess, but real life adventures.

They love, they lose, they have mid-life crises, they date each other, break up with each other, they get married, they have kids and finally in the last season you meet the mother. But don’t worry I won’t give anything away about the ending.

Still though, episode after episode, I fell more and more in love with this show. Slowly, I started to realize that my perspective on life was changing.

These are the 10 amazing things about life, love and growing up that changed my life from the show.

Number 10:

Sometimes you just have to be spontaneous. Nobody wants a boring lifestyle. I believe if you act out of the ordinary you will get to experience out of the ordinary things.

Number 9:

We all have to grow up at some point in our life. As much as we would all love to stay young and never take responsibility for our own lives, at some point you either grow up or you’ll be forced to grow up.

Number 8:

Never take somebody for granted. They will be gone before you know it. Always appreciate who is in your life. Just because they’re here now does not mean that they’ll be here tomorrow and you have to treat people that way.

Number 7:

New is not always better. Sometimes old things can be beautiful and important. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s not significant.

Number 6:

Never get caught up in your career. Life is too short to spend your days behind a desk. Family, friends and yourself are more important than a job. Remember that the desk will always be there but people can walk away.

Number 5:

Appreciate your friends. They’ll be there to make fun of you. They’ll be there when you cry. They’ll be there for all the big moments. So don’t lose them. Fight for them until you can’t fight anymore and then find a way to keep going.

Number 4:

You’ll learn to trust again. No matter how badly somebody hurts you, you can learn to trust in people again. It might take along time and a lot of trials and errors but you can do it. Try to always be open minded and don’t let the past hold you back from a happy future.

Number 3:

Life is messy. You can’t always expect to have all your dreams come true. Learn to except that someday you might look back and realize that you don’t have the life you imagined. But that doesn’t mean your life isn’t amazing. Remember you are where you are now for a reason. Life isn’t ever going to be predictable and that’s what makes it worth living.

Number 2:

Never give up. You never know when something amazing will happen to you and make you realize that life was supposed to be like this. The world works in mysterious ways. So you can’t ever give up. Find a way to keep moving forward.

Finally number 1:

In this show, the number one lesson that I learned was that it doesn’t matter how long it takes you to find who you love. Once you do, those years without them all seem to throw the two of you together. Every lost relationship, every turn you made, or every mistake that you learned from or never learned from. It’s like your reborn into a new life and finally everything makes sense.

We all have that somebody that will steal a blue french horn, go all the way across the country for a locket or watch you love somebody else because it makes you happy. I believe that everybody has somebody that loves them unconditionally.

For those of us who don’t have them yet, be patient, destiny is working. You just don’t have the whole story yet.