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LIVIN' THE DREAM: How to get what you want, find true meaning and save the world by bowling!
AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR Q: What is the book about? A: The book is about how the valuable lessons I learned through my lifelong involvement in bowling saved my life and transformed me from an unhappy cynic into a blissfully happy optimist. Q: What made you decide to write it? A: I had been out of the bowling industry for about two years and I had hit a very low point in my attitude about life. Through the help of a family member, I was able to rediscover the important lessons about success, spirituality and connecting with others. I was so excited about this transformation that I decided to write a book that attempts to detail the metamorphosis while outlining the important lessons I remembered. Q: How is this book different from other self-help books? A: The book is different in a number of ways. First, I am a very unlikely person to have written a self-help book. If you had known me before I'd written the book, you'd know precisely what I mean. But that fact alone reveals how strongly I felt about writing it, because I knew that if I could change for the better, then I felt anyone could do it and that there was a good chance that I could help a lot of people by describing the process and arranging the pieces in a way that could be easily understood. The other key point of difference is the way the book is arranged. The story is structured into three parts, The Method, Some Cool Tricks and For the Hard-Core Cynics, each of which contain the important lessons I wanted to share. Every chapter is also broken up with a narrative of my personal story, told for the purpose of detailing my amazing attitude transformation. It begins with the extremely low point when others felt the need to reach out to help me to remember the important things in life and goes on to detail the many people that helped me to learn the most important life lessons, including: my childhood friend Robert Smith, my father (a former President of Disneyland International), PBA Chairman Chris Peters and former PBA CEO Steve Miller. Q: Is the book as funny as your blogs? A: Yes! But there is also a serious side too. Q: How is your book different from something like The Secret? A: My book is similar to The Secret in that it proposes a method for success, but it is different in a number of ways. First, it is a bit more practical when it comes to outlining the method for achieving success. The Secret comes very close to describing a similar method for success in its "Ask, Believe, Receive" mantra. In my book, the first two of these elements ("Ask" and "Believe") are integral (although I call them "Dream" and "Self-Belief"), but I believe there has to be some proactive work done to achieve the goal. I call it hard work (which turns a lot of people off, of course) but to use the model of The Secret, you would simply replace the word "Receive" with "Retrieve." The best part of all this (and the good news for the folks who don't want to have to work hard) is that once you decide on what you want and then you begin to believe you can get it, the work is no longer hard, but becomes a fun activity that fills your days with joy and purpose. Second, my book spends a significant amount of time discussing how to deal with your success once you've attained it (and that conducting yourself in this manner before you reach your goals will actually help you get there even faster). Probably the best way to describe my book is that it's a cross between The Secret and the late Randy Pausch's book, The Last Lecture. But I also quote a number of more research-driven books like Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Sam Harris' The End of Faith and Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate to help me make my point. Q: Do you have to be a bowler to like this book? A: Absolutely not! Bowling obviously plays a major role (although it really serves more as the setting rather than as the primary focal point) because of my involvement with the sport my whole life. But the lessons bowling taught me are lessons I could have learned if I had chosen to be a golfer or a doctor or a writer (oops, I guess that one's a bad example now). My hope is that the book will find its way into the hands of people who don't bowl and that these people will come away with a new appreciation for bowlers and the sport of bowling. Q: What is your goal with the book? A: That is a simple one. To help as many people as possible to experience the gift of embracing an optimistic way of life and to help them reap its many rewards.
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