Monday, September 14, 2015

Losers All Around

Hello again! 

Don’t be afraid.  I recovered from the joy I was feeling at the success that my sisters and I had while watching Only Connect last week.  There will not be bragging herein.  Because we did terribly this past week.  Only two questions right.  (In case you just NEED to know: the lion question in round two where C.V./Curriculum Vitae was the answer and the first satnav question in the missing vowel round.)

This week, before I’d watched Only Connect, I’d seen on Twitter that the show is nearing the episodes where the questions will begin to get harder.  This was the first week where two teams that had previously lost were coming together to determine which should stay.  Even the team who lost in this episode performed well when compared to the (pathetic) standard which we’d set while sitting on our couch.  It does make you feel a bit better about having a difficult time with the answers when Richard Osman (a host of a different quiz, just so you know) tweets about the show calling it the “Ultimate Hell Week” of quizzes (until he then tweets that he was doing great on that episode’s clues). 

The benefit, I think, of the way that Only Connect is set up is that a sense of failure doesn’t overwhelm you as much as it might if you don’t get a single question on Jeopardy!.  The two contributing factors to that, at least for me, are your time and your team.  Yes, your time to get the connection on Only Connect is limited, but you aren’t forced to move quicker because you are worried that your competitor will get it before you will.  When you’re putting your mind fully to the task, you will get it if you know the information or not if not.  It’s also harder to feel so completely beaten when you’ve put together your knowledge with others to try and find the connections between the clues.  A wider base of knowledge is going to exist between three people than within one person (even when, in the case of my sisters and I, large amounts of life experience overlap). 
I mean, do what you will with that.  I’m likely looking too hard for some deep meanings in this but it makes sense and applies to other situations, right?


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