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Monday, January 19, 2009
Ben Button v. Forrest GumpI saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button over the holiday break. My wife and I rarely get a chance
to go out to the movies these days, what with two young boys and a strong sense of guilt for leaving them with friends or
family (not so much for the boys, but for the people that have to watch them). But their Grandma and Grandpa (daringly) offered
to let them spend the night over at their house one evening around New Year's and it was party time for me and the Mrs!
Luckily, we both wanted to see the same film (usually it's a knock-down-drag-out between two films like The
Incredible Hulk and The Notebook-one guess as to who prefers what) and I was especially looking forward to it
since CCBB's screenwriter is the same individual responsible for the Forrest Gump script, which is one of my
top five favorite films of all time (I even used examples from the film in my book).
Unfortunately, even though
the movie was quite well-made in just about every respect, it fell a little flat for me (I was hoping for something a little
more uplifting and/or emotionally stirring, I guess) but there was a part at the end that really made me think about life
and has stayed with me since. As the movie is wrapping up, Benjamin (played by Brad Pitt) is talking in voice-over about the
fatefulness of how each of us chooses a vocation (or how these vocations choose us) and how, whatever it is we choose, our
accomplishments and ultimately, our lives, are only temporary and will eventually be washed away by the unstoppable flood
of time. Happy thought, eh?
The speech is edited over a montage of clips featuring the characters we've met
over the course of the film, as Benjamin describes who they are with one-word descriptions that we all would easily recognize
as job descriptions or job categories. One is an actor, one a dancer. One is a tugboat captain and another is a wife of a
statesman. One is a mother. The only one who really escapes this labeling is Benjamin himself, who, unlike Forrest Gump, never
really amounts to anything close to what most of us would recognize in our materially-obsessed world as successful. But that
is the point. That is, to make us ask ourselves, "who are we and what are our lives defined by?"
I only
bring this up in a column that is supposed to be about bowling because I've often experienced this kind of labeling in
my own life. I've certainly done and tried a great number of things outside of bowling-heck, I've even tried to escape
bowling completely for certain periods of my life-but once people find out about my past their most likely choice of word
to describe me from then on is as "the bowler" (second is "the bald guy," so I think I prefer bowler,
personally.) The thing I find most interesting about this is that whenever I've tried to turn away from bowling, I'm
always flooded with thoughts, ideas and images about bowling, almost as if some force were trying to draw me back into it
as if to be a bowler were my destiny.
Only recently (in the past two years to be exact), have I stopped trying
to fight those impulses and simply received those thoughts, impulses and ideas and allowed myself to transmit them to others
in the form of my book, Let's Go Bowling, The Bowling Show, this blog, my website and my TV recap column on pba.com. Of
course, some ideas are more well-liked than others, but I've been more than pleasantly surprised and, actually, a bit
overwhelmed by all of the praise and encouragement I've received from fellow bowlers. I think the reason people have responded
so positively is that they can recognize that what I'm trying to do is coming from the heart and from my passion for bowling
and a strong desire to see the sport succeed and gain the respect we all feel it deserves.
In any case, I still
wish Benjamin Button could have been a bit more Gump-like in it's storytelling and in the way it celebrated the importance
of getting out there and never being afraid to try something new. In that respect, the two films carry a similar message,
and it is one that I believe we would all benefit from pondering every now and again. It's definitely a truth that some
of us are doctors, some are lawyers and some of us are plumbers. Like many of you, I happen to be a bowler and it certainly
appears there is nothing I (or we) can do to change it. I guess all that's left is to do as Forrest did and make the most
of what we've been given in life.
See you next week!
Click here to check out an interview with Jason Thomas about his book "Livin' The Dream: How to Get What You Want, Find True
Meaning and Save the World by Bowling!" To purchase a copy of the book, click here.
Click here to check out "Jason's TV Recap - Uncensored" on PBA.com.
To check out the latest episode of The
Bowling Show >>> Click Here
See you next week!
jason@jasonthomasbowling.com
7:04 pm est
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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. 
