You miss 100% of the shots you don't take!
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take! Tangentially, I hate this phrase. It ignores the fact that there's an opportunity cost to missed shots. If you're imagining the metaphor of a ball game, it's possession (and thus time and position). If you imagine the metaphor of a gun, it's your limited supply of bullets. This exhortation has an implicit assumption of endless resources, which are typically not available in the real world. Of course there are times you should risk things on an uncertain outcome, and be willing to move on to the next opportunity - trying to hold on to a declining situation is often motivated by a sunk-costs fallacy. But I've heard the 'miss shots you don't take' thing proffered too many times as an excuse for ego-driven, risk-indifferent, and resource-wasting decisions and I'm pretty tired of it. There is a certain sort of person (but I don't men you, parent poster) who comes into a situation, fucks everything up, and then sails off with the excuse of what a bold, visionary risk-taker they are, blaming any obvious failures on the timidity of the team/colleagues. An excess reliance on sports metaphors has become a huge red flag for me in picking the people I work with.
Posted by anigbrowl on Feb 6, 2015, 9:47 PM
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Raise real-world problems, find people facing the same issue, and discuss solutions.8,000 issues0 comments
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Yeah PC was a horrible platform before Win2k, but there was a beautiful short time period when we had alternatives like Amiga, Atari, NeX...
Living in a 200+ year old house, I've seen a lot of this first-hand through both planned and unplanned renovations and repairs.
Is anything with the pebble time able to capture heart rate for historical data analysis?
Datastar has evolved into a suite of tools [1].
> real issue is that MSG is basically a public utility.
Everything good is a slippery slope: every step in the right direction is bad if you overshoot.
Status Update - May 2026
I think what you wrote makes sense, and you missed one critical aspect : shared access to excessively expensive capitalized facilities an...
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take!
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take! Tangentially, I hate this phrase. It ignores the fact that there's an opportunity cost to missed shots. If you're imagining the metaphor of a ball game, it's possession (and thus time and position). If you imagine the metaphor of a gun, it's your limited supply of bullets. This exhortation has an implicit assumption of endless resources, which are typically not available in the real world. Of course there are times you should risk things on an uncertain outcome, and be willing to move on to the next opportunity - trying to hold on to a declining situation is often motivated by a sunk-costs fallacy. But I've heard the 'miss shots you don't take' thing proffered too many times as an excuse for ego-driven, risk-indifferent, and resource-wasting decisions and I'm pretty tired of it. There is a certain sort of person (but I don't men you, parent poster) who comes into a situation, fucks everything up, and then sails off with the excuse of what a bold, visionary risk-taker they are, blaming any obvious failures on the timidity of the team/colleagues. An excess reliance on sports metaphors has become a huge red flag for me in picking the people I work with.
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