How To Fix Overthinking
The legendary football coach Vince Lombardi had his shares of wins and loses. Or so you would think. But he had a unique way of viewing such things. When asked about games where his team “lost”, he was fond of saying:
We didn’t lose the game. We just ran out of time.
This is a really great sentiment that places the blame of a bad outcome on some artificial, external constraint: time. Had those arbitrary time limits been removed, I think Lombardi would have made his team play for months to get a win. The final score in his matches would have probably been something like 1,042–1,017.
Such is the persistence of a professional sports team. Give them a field, an opponent, and a set of rules and they’ll compete as long as necessary to win. This is why time limits are very important.
All the great games have a time limit. It doesn’t have to be a clock. For instance, it’s twelve rounds in a boxing match. Nine innings in a baseball game. Five games in a tennis match. Eighteen holes in golf.
Setting sports aside, we see limits in other games, too. It’s critical for pacing. There are antes in poker to keep people from sitting on large chip stacks for hours. Chess has a clock for many variations of its play. And then there’s Monopoly. Some time ago, Hasbro introduced “speed dice”…
