Whoever said you can’t learn anything from watching television perhaps has too much of a simplistic view on that argument, because there is indeed a lot to be learned from watching the right programming. Movies in particular are perhaps primarily meant to make for pure entertainment, but if you take a closer look then each film actually has a lesson to teach.
Sometimes the lesson isn’t an obvious and straight-forward one, like how I recently came to learn a lesson in the re-discovery of the true value of gifts through watching various movies that feature cars in them and not necessarily just from one movie. I hasten to add that it wasn’t even by my own ingenuity that I came to learn this particular lesson, as much as I’d love to take all the credit for it.
It was the #MovieCarRace campaign by LeaseCar UK which sparked the lesson, featuring movie cars that were pitted against each other to see which of them are the fastest. The brief was to see which of these cars would hit 60mph in the quickest time and even on my limited knowledge of the technical specifications of cars, I could have guessed correctly that the winner was likely to be the 1999 Nissan Skyline GT-R R34, or maybe Batman’s Tumbler which was featured in The Dark Knight, but come on, that’s not a real car, is it? I was right…
Be that as it may, the all-important re-discovery of true value in gifts is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but how it transpired was that I wanted to buy some gifts for my toddler nephew and the toy versions of all these featured movies cars came to mind as possible gifts. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a complete set so I had to had them custom 3-D printed and could subsequently only choose about five of the ten featured.
The first instinct was to choose them according to how fast they are, i.e. the top five fastest, but then I thought about how my little nephew loved the movie Herbie so much, as do I, and it became apparent that the true value of this particular gift resides in its association with a personal experience and not in what the manufacturers, marketers and retailers tout!
So with any gift, it’s not about how expensive it is or about how popular it is in line with a widely touted characteristic it possesses. It’s about how it relates to the person for whom you want to get it.