Tuesday, October 27, 2015

The "Hot Hand."

For years, I've been touting the fact that there is no such thing as the "hot hand." No such thing as the "zone" that athletes talk about. It's an illusion.

That "career years" and "streaks" get rounded out by statistics.

Turns out, there is some doubt now about those studies. A mathematical error I don't understand.

So maybe there is such a thing as the baseball looking like a basketball to a baseball hitter, a hoop looking five feet wide after all.

Why did I tout this? Even though my intuition and instincts seem to tell me something different?

I think it was a way for me to reinforce persistence as the  most important attribute in any enterprise. The race doesn't always go to the swiftest, the smartest, the whatever, but to the guy who hangs in there, keeps trying, working, learning.

If you do it long enough, the statistics even out -- you'll have the "hot" month or year, just by an average result.

So for instance, my feeling was that if I wrote 30 books and they were consistently strong efforts, that statistically one of them would be "hot" just through the law of averages.

So now what?

Well, it doesn't make much difference, once I think about it.

It just means that if I write 30 books, that at some point along the way, I'll have a "hot hand." The same persistence applies. Heh.

Or it just proves I'm going to do what I'm going to do and I'll rationalize the reasons later. 

2 comments:

OHDG said...

I think the zone really exists. It happens when you practice a lot at something and then let go. Just fall into it and pull it up all around you and dive in. Let it become you. I've experienced it before... it's hard as cerebral thinkers to do, because we are so divorced from our body most of the time.... here's a video that shows a little bit about it from a sport perspective: "The Madness"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAzMlbl3Eqw

Duncan McGeary said...

Yeah, I've been in the zone a few times, in sports and elsewhere.

Don't know why I bought into the idea it was an illusion. I'm usually on the side of intuition, and everything told me it happens.