I’m not one to believe in the graces of God coming down to redirect our sails into greener pastures. I’m not one to believe that the universe is laced with some cosmic equation of karma that proportionately awards behavior in a ‘what goes around, comes around’ kind of way. (Proof). I’m sure there are dozens of other, similar-type belief structures that in one way or another, explain a lot of the hows and whys of every day human life. I’m not one to believe in those either. Not because I’m an overall non-believer, but it usually takes a little more evidence for me to buy in. It helps me to believe in the tangible. And part of it, I’m sure, is that it helps me believe in me. If I had to justify my successes by admitting they were a product of a greater majestic blueprint, it would start to take away a feeling of accomplishment.
But I’m not here to make this all about beliefs. I’ve done mildly well avoiding that gigantic, polarizing bag of opinions, and this time, I only use my abbreviated thoughts as a spring board to the most prevalent topic on my mind. I opened this post with a quote from one of my favorite movies. I was going to say ‘if you haven’t seen it, you should,’ but that’s not entirely true. If you really hate baseball, well, then I’d say skip it. Otherwise, it’s classic. And what the quote is referring to is a scene in which a young pitcher is the driving force behind a triple-A ball club’s winning streak. Now, the point of the quote is that it never matters how or why a streak starts, but whatever you believe you’re doing or not doing that might or might not have sparked the streak, well, you just keep doing or not doing it. As Crash says, moments later, “If you believe you're playing well because you're getting laid, or because you're not getting laid, or because you wear women's underwear, then you ARE!”
This kind of superstition is rampant in baseball. From never stepping on the foul line (guilty superstition) to adjusting your batting gloves to tapping your toes to touching the center field fence before every inning, I’ve never met a player that doesn’t do or believe in anything, as silly or serious as it might seem.
Funny part is, this quote applies to baseball and real life the same. I know plenty of people that find small or insignificant things in their habits that they deem responsible or any number of random victories or rolling hot streaks. Whether it’s a guy having good luck with meeting girls after switching shampoos, or a lawyer winning case after case because of a new leather binder, it doesn’t take much to assign a reason.
So why do we do it? Why do we think the winds don’t change for any reason? Why can’t we accept that we might be doing something different which elicited these new results? Why don’t we see there might be consistently random patterns of success and failure based on things out of our control?
Assigning something responsible for a run of good luck is regrettable. I think there is a lot to be gained by blaming yourself as your successes or failures begin to stack at unprecedented rates. Believing that a new pair of shoes is responsible for your better free throw shooting percentage is silly. Now, believing that you think the shoes make you better, but in reality, they just give you more confidence to go do your thing? Well that’s a theory based in much stronger reality.
There is also the theory that winning begets winning and confidence begets confidence, or combing the two and saying confidence breeds success. So now we have the idea that you don’t know why things have taken a turn for the better, but it’s a snowball effect. It happens once? Luck. It happens twice? Coincidence. It happens three times? Well obviously I can do no wrong, so I have no reason to believe that numbers four, five, and six will happen without even having to try. And a confident person will typically have a higher success rate, so once again, is based in some sort of reality.
So there are a lot of reasons that can be applied to a hot streak. Quite honestly, most of them are plausible, and I’d be lying if I said I really thought any of them were 100% correct. But what I do know is they’re rare. Maybe not specific to an athlete, since I’m pretty sure it’s not rare that Derrick Rose is a badass on the court every night. And maybe not to a brilliant mind, since I’m pretty sure getting A’s throughout high school in college goes past a ‘hot streak.’ But for those caught in the middle, those of us somewhere between slightly above constant failure and just below constant success, streaks are not a dime a dozen.
When you find yourself turning over aces every time you’re dealt a card, don’t bother checking the deck. It might be random, it might be you, it might be a higher power, it might be your shoes; it doesn’t matter. Whatever keeps you moving in the right direction is worth believing in.
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