The Tie Goes to the Runner

In baseball, when a runner arrives at the bag at the same time as the ball, people in the stands will often yell,” The tie goes to the runner!” Meaning the runner should be safe… however, there is no such formal rule in baseball, and it’s the umpire’s job to decide if the runner is safe or not.

What this brings to mind is that in life we do not like having ambiguity in the decisions that we’re trying to make, we want there to be a clear answer, one way or the other, and sometimes we have two seemingly equal good decisions or bad decisions in front of us.

So, how do you decide what to do next?

When I worked in the publishing business, if two department heads came to the publisher’s office with ideas that were somewhat competitive with each other, and he didn’t want to be the one to make that final decision, sometimes we would cut a deck of cards and each person would do that, and whoever had the higher card got to implement their solution or their plan.

Other times, he would flip this poker chip… this is the actual one that he would flip, and the winner would get the opportunity to go ahead with whatever they had in mind.

In life, I think it’s helpful for us to have things we can do when we’re faced with equal alternatives and can’t decide which to choose, and maybe it doesn’t matter whether you cut cards, flip a poker chip, or come up with your own rule, maybe what matters is what you do after you’ve made that decision.