#168: The Buzzer Trilogy — Part 1: Buzzer Management.
If having the right answer to a question felt important to you, what about having the opportunity to be the first to answer a question?
«You need to press the buzzer before you know the answer.»
Why would you want to take the risk of giving the wrong answer or, which feels even worse, having no answer at all?
Being right or wrong is just one aspect of playing the quiz. If you aren’t fast enough in pressing the buzzer, you will never get a shot. Well, not necessarily. If the person pressing first answers the question incorrectly, then you might be next in line. However, it would be a risky strategy to wait for other people’s mistakes or failures. In real life, you don’t just play against one opponent. There are lots of them out there playing the same game as you do.
So thinking about them, you will find that at least one of them is likely to know the answer to a particular question. Hence, if you let that person have the first shot at answering the question, you might never be able to demonstrate what you know.
Interestingly, once you move away from the quiz show setting where the timing between pressing the buzzer and having to answer the question is pretty much given, you realize how variable that time period can be.
Over the course of the last 2 years, I have experienced numerous «buzzer moments». The context would have naturally been different from a quiz show. Obviously, as we are talking about real life. Most of the time, it was related to an enquiry whether or not I wanted to deliver a service, contribute to a project or co-create a novel experience.
A great example is the culture project «Kultour» aimed at supporting local artists during the covid pandemic by offering them a small stage to perform their art and paying them a decent salary. All I knew was that there was a need for a mobile stage, which I accidentally happened to own. So when I met the other members of the hastily formed project team, the media information had already been drafted and a media conference was scheduled for later that day.
So I decided to «press the buzzer» hopeful that we would be able to deliver within the coming two weeks. Even the late arrival of the stage due to the shipping agent suffering a heart attack, threats by a local culture icon and the psychological meltdown of a team member couldn’t hold us back from «giving the right answer». In hindsight, it initially «felt wrong in so many ways», as Seth put it.
And yet, the full experience ended up being one of the most intense periods of my life.
«Buzz, buzz, buzz.»
This post is adapted from one of my favourite stories by Seth Godin dating back to 2015.
