The Unshakable Fallacy of Success by Shaky S. Driftland

The score was 39 yellow, 37 black, and we were in the final frame of a hard-fought, low-scoring match on one of Betmar’s brand-new courts.

But these were not just new courts. These were mystery courts.

The kind of courts where strange and unexplained things happen. You could watch your disk glide beautifully down the court, tracking exactly where you wanted it to go, and then—out of the blue, or perhaps I should say out of the green—it would come to a complete stop as though it had just hit a puddle of Elmer’s Glue.

Or you could shoot what appeared to be a perfectly straight disk, only to watch it make an “S” curve tighter than a 1980s Tyco racetrack before spinning slightly back up the court, apparently under the control of forces from the dark side.

Despite all this, nobody really had much of a court-knowledge advantage for two reasons. First, these were among the first games ever played on the new courts. Second, any drift card you attempted to create would have looked like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics written by someone having a seizure.

That is literally how confusing these courts were—unless you were lucky enough to land on one of the rare courts where at least one side behaved like it had been built according to the normal laws of physics.

My partner and I were not that fortunate, and neither were our opponents.

I was playing yellow at the head. I had just sent my hammer down toward the 8 when—surprise, surprise—the court opened up and swallowed my disk. Not literally, of course. Although at this point, I would not have ruled it out.

Instead, my disk came to a nice, gentle, completely useless stop just as it crossed the 8-7 line.

And there it sat. Dead. A small yellow monument to disappointment but not defeat.

My partner went into the last frame with a 39–37 lead, and I’m thinking, “You know what to do”, and so it seemed she did as she cleared disk after disk with machine-like precision.

Things were looking good. Suspiciously good. Then it happened.

Her opponent shot their final disk and left a high 7. There appeared to be maybe five inches—at best—between the top of the black disk and the 7-8 line.

Now, from my position at the head, the strategy seemed fairly obvious.

Clear the black disk.

Win the game.

Bump fists and savor a hard-earned victory.

Apparently, however, my partner and I were operating under two very different definitions of “success.”

This brings me to something I now call the “Unshakable Fallacy of Success” in Mingle Events.

The fallacy works like this: whatever you believe success looks like, there is a very good chance your partner has envisioned something far more creative, ambitious, and potentially catastrophic.

In my mind, success looked like this:

Clear the black 7 and let’s take our 39–37 victory before these courts have another opportunity to violate the laws of nature.

In my partner’s mind, success apparently looked more like this:

Why merely win the game when I can attempt to kitchen that black disk while simultaneously squeezing my yellow hammer into a five-inch opening between the black disk and the 7-8 line?

How do I know this was her thinking?

Because she told me afterward.

Unfortunately, she told me after shooting the hammer.

Her disk stopped on the 7-8 line.

The opponent’s black disk remained comfortably in the 7.

Game over.

Standing beside me at the head of the court, my opponent stared toward the other end in complete disbelief.

“What just happened?” he asked, as joyous laughter began rising from the depths of what, only seconds earlier, had been his certain despair. His face transformed as he slowly realized that a game he had apparently lost had somehow been handed back to him.

It was like witnessing Florida man receive a last-second pardon from the governor.

“Tough loss,” he said.

Was it? Was it really?

I walked down to the foot, gave my partner the customary “Good game” fist bump, as she delivered the sentence that perfectly summarized the entire experience:

“I was trying to get us a few extra points.”

And there it was.

We already had enough points to win.

But apparently, winning by two simply lacked artistic flair.

So instead of accepting a boring 39–37 victory, we failed spectacularly.

That, my friends, is the Unshakable Fallacy of Success.