I learned a WILD fact about bowling scores the other day.
Yes, I’m serious.
Not like “Tiger King” wild, but still pretty interesting.
My boyfriend, who’s in a bowling league, explained achieving a perfect game of 300 is hard–but not as impossible as you might think.
The wild part is when most bowlers do get a perfect game, they rarely crack 800.
In case you were wondering how we got to 800, let me (him) explain.
You play 3 games at a time. If someone gets a 300 in one game, it’s unlikely that he averages 250 in the other two games.
How could someone get a perfect score and immediately drop 50 points per game??
As my boyfriend continued, it started to make sense.
You might be good at hitting strikes but not so good at picking up spares. And picking up spares, where you get all the pins in two tries instead of just one, is very important to your average.
If you get all strikes, nobody cares about the spares.
And people LOVE to throw strikes.
So you focus on strikes and hope for a lucky game, even though improving your ability to hit spares is a better investment in your bowling average.
We love to shoot for the big, impressive wins.
We want to launch an amazing product, not fix the bugs. We want to write a best-seller, not develop a niche series.
Big dreams are great. They force us to push ourselves and test our limits.
But if you’re not going for the once-in-a-lifetime kind of success, that’s fine too. You can focus on the average.
Picking up your spares is just as good.
To being better without swinging for the fences,
Elizabeth