How do torrents even work lol?

Yo guys. I have a unique method that I'm going to try using with torrents, but I'm really confused about how this works.
Basically, I have a .torrent file and I am trying to put it on a Seedbox on my dedicated VPS..
when I try to download the .torrent, it stays on 0%. Here's an image:


Do I need to get a friend to download it with me or what? I'm confused & tried googling a lot about this. Any help is appreciated greatly.

this may help: http://www.callingallgeeks.org/how-to-create-a-torrent-file-and-upload-using-utorrent/ or i'm sure that you can find tutorial videos on youtube, if you're the visual type