For years now, I’ve identified this as one of the main issues with how most people think: they fail to see the big picture. Most people pick one aspect of a certain situation and base their entire opinion on it. If they pick out a good thing or an advantage of something, they’ll use that to forever defend it. Conversely, if they picked out a bad thing, they’ll forever keep yelling it as the obvious reason the whole thing is bad.
As someone who tries to think objectively and actually solve all problems logically, this frustrates me. I am completely baffled by how people with functioning brains fail to see how much they’re ignoring and how naming one example or statistic does not mean anything. I am baffled how politicians do the same thing and use it to enact stupid laws, and people actually agree with them and vote for them.
Long story short: stop doing that! Form your opinions or actions based on as much data as you can gather, both the pros and the cons, both what came before and what came after, both direct and indirect consequences. Be prepared to change your opinion once new data comes in that refutes it. I think this simple change would solve a large majority of problems in the world, I really do.
Of course, this takes effort. You might realize you’ve been wrong about something your entire life. You need to think for a bit longer before you speak. You can’t have strong and bold and controversial opinions about most things, because most problems are nuanced.
So to keep things light-hearted and appeal to a different crowd, I will explain all this with a soccer analysis metaphor. (Also just because I found it funny and the European Championship has just started.) Or sports analysis in general.
How does it work? If you’ve ever sat through a break in a sports match, or watched a late-night talkshow about soccer, you’ll know the drill.
- Somebody walks to a screen and plays a 3-second clip of some situation. (Maybe a blunder by the goalkeeper, an own goal, whatever.)
- They point at the person making the mistake, maybe draw some circles around them, to state the bleedingly obvious.
- “So yeah, big blunder by the keeper. If he jumps earlier, he catches that ball. He lost them the game.”
They all nod and murmur their agreement. The newspapers write about how the goalkeeper played a terrible game. Everyone moves on, rinse and repeat for every single match and every single situation.
But no, this is stupid!
Let’s play that clip for a little longer. Let’s play the entire minute leading up to that goal being scored.
- Hey, one of the defenders positions themselves weirdly.
- This causes another defender to cover the gap, creating a new gap in the midfield.
- The midfielders realize this too late and are too late with their challenges, creating a chaotic situation where the ball bounces off a few bodies.
- The goalkeeper, trying to get a better look and realizing this was going wrong, takes a few more steps closer to the play.
- That defender that was out of position comes running back, so the goalkeeper decides the defense will handle it and returns to goal.
- But exactly at that moment, the attacker suddenly shoots and catches the keeper in no man’s land. He makes an awkward jump in surprise, misses the ball, goal.
Almost every “blunder” or “bad challenge” or “wrong position” in soccer has a long chain of events leading up to it. Tiny mistakes, tiny surprising events or decisions, that led to this final outcome. It is actually rarely the fault of the final player on whom they focus.
This is bonkers to me. How “professional analysts”, paid a lot to sit in a chair and point at a player missing a ball, can spew out such nonsense and only consider 3 seconds out of a 90 minute match. And then claim they have anything to say.
But this is how people work. They never look at the big picture. They focus on one thing only, probably the one thing they believed anyway, and never look at anything else. Nobody will ever improve, or learn, or make meaningful decisions based on analysis like that.
On a smaller scale, I’ve experienced this myself in the video game that is probably closest to soccer in mechanics and simulation: Rocket League. (Yes, that game is even closer than Fifa.)
In Rocket League, you are cars playing soccer. You’re in a cage (you can drive on the walls and ceiling), there’s a huge ball, and there are huge goals. By pointing yourself upward and “boosting” you can also fly and play in the air.
The most prominent game mode is 3v3. You’re in a team with 2 other online strangers and try to hit that ball into the opponent’s goal for 5 minutes.
It is a really fun, really skilful game … until your teammates or opponents inevitably act like babies and ruin it.
Whenever a goal is scored against us, or I miss a shot on net, they instantly blame me. They call me trash, say I suck, say I should stop playing the game, etcetera. If they’re too lazy to type in chat, they’ll just propose to “forfeit”: they are so disappointed in your gameplay that they just want to give up and end the game.
At first, even I was tempted to agree with them. There was a shot on net, and I barely missed the touch to save it, so the goal went in because of my lack of skill … right?
Wrong. Since playing the game for the first time, I’ve watched a lot of the professional Esports scene, watched analysis or tutorial videos, and played it a lot more.
The reason a goal was scored against you is almost always because of what happened in the 30 seconds leading up to it. (Rocket League is a very fast-paced game, otherwise this period would be longer.)
Here’s an example of a recent game I played.
- I think the ball is clearly mine and drive to shoot it.
- My teammate suddenly cuts me off from behind and hits the ball away instead, so now I am in an awkward position.
- I try to be a good teammate and turn back to defend in case it goes wrong.
- But my other teammate expected my touch, so they drove in position to play from that, so they are now also out of position and going back to net.
- We bump into each other as we return to net.
- The opponent shoots the ball, neither of us can recover in time to save what should have been saveable.
- The other teammate calls both of us trash and wants to forfeit.
If you only played that 3-second clip of the end, yes, you’d say we were both out of position and our jump to save the ball was too late. You’d ask yourself how on earth we could be driving in such an odd location (after our bump into each other blew us apart, which you never saw).
If you played the entire 20 seconds, you’d clearly see that the only reason this all happened was because that teammate—yes, the one complaining, as usual—did something stupid.
This happens multiple times in every game.
- My teammate is clearly heading back, so I can push up. SURPRISE! They suddenly turned and now I’m at their heels, unable to do anything lest I bump them or miss the play. A few seconds later, they call me trash for being in the wrong position or missing the next ball.
- My teammate gives away the ball for free and does nothing to stop the opponent. So I have to rush back and I do! I make a miraculous save, tapping a fast ball away from the upper-right corner of the goal. This means I am completely out of boost and briefly disoriented, relying on my teammate for clean-up. My teammate obviously thinks “they did defense, so I can stay in offense” and doesn’t return to help. So a few seconds later, the ball still rolls into our net, and my teammate leaves the game in a rage.
- Or it doesn’t even have to be your own team. The opponent might make a mistake, such as sending two players flying at the ball and both missing. Now all three of us think “a free ball, an open net, let’s score!” So all three of us fly in, but we don’t score, and now the opponent can just walk the ball into our net. By trying to pounce on an earlier mistake by the opponent, we made an even worse mistake ourselves. But if you only showed that 3-second clip, we’d all look like idiots blindly jumping for no reason.
Context matters. Having all the facts matters. No, that’s too weak. The only time you may ever act and decide something is when you are pretty sure you’ve seen the entire picture. Without it, you might as well have been a monkey blindly bashing on a typewriter and hoping the works of Shakespeare roll out at some point.
The examples I’ve given have been light-hearted, just to poke fun and the weird atmosphere around both soccer analysts and the Rocket League game. But they’re also a very pure illustration of my point.
Almost every mistake in a situation is not the fault of that final person doing the wrong thing. In fact, they are usually the last one to blame, as they desperately tried to work with what they got and salvage the situation.
The goalkeeper is blamed for blundering, while the analysts don’t even notice one of the defenders jogging back like they have all the time in the world and not doing anything. I am called trash because I missed a ball, while the third teammate literally hasn’t been in defense for 2 minutes.
We live in a society where doing something and not being perfect is punished far more severely than doing nothing at all and saying “wasn’t me, I did nothing”.
We also live in a society that somehow doesn’t understand how cause->effect works, or time in general. They fight for certain laws, changes, or cancellations … and then act dumbfounded when the only logical consequence of that plays out.
I guess this article just wanted to quickly explain this mind-set, why it is wrong, and the consequences of that.
The next time you’re about to form or voice an opinion, ask yourself if you actually have all the facts. Ask yourself if you’re hyper-focusing on one aspect (that suits you the most, or is the only one you really know). Ask yourself if there is a related chain of events leading up to that one thing, or you’re only seeing the tip of an iceberg. If you believe something to be good, challenge yourself to find as many negatives or disadvantages for that same thing.
I would like to see soccer analysts actually play longer clips and uncover the entire chain of events leading to some mistake. Actually, you know, analyse and give insightful, objective, correct feedback or ideas about what happened in a game.
Oh, and I would like to not be called trash continuously for trying to salvage the mess other people made in my Rocket League game.
Anyway, those were my random thoughts as the European Championship kicked off.
Until next time,
Tiamo