For some strange reason, I got to thinking about Beat the Clock years later, and I realized that we, the audience, focused on the clock, while we should have been watching the contestants’ activity and behavior. Worse, the contestants were always looking up to see how much time they had remaining. But this shouldn’t have mattered. They were working as fast as they could, weren’t they? If they beat the clock, they beat it; if they didn’t, they didn’t. Watching the clock only slowed them down and made it more likely that they would not beat the clock. Bottom line: usually it wasn’t the clock
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