HOW BUSINESS IMITATES THE TIMES CROSSWORD CHAMPIONSHIP
I took part in the preliminary final of the Times Crossword Championship on Saturday. I’d like to say I competed, but the people who go on to the Grand Final are playing a game with which I am not familiar.
Let’s get this out of the way; this is not a brag, humble or otherwise. Nobody should see being good at crosswords as a measure of intelligence; all it means is that I have been doing them for a long time and so have had plenty of practice.
But for someone in the process of developing a business, there were echoes of my professional situation while I wrestled with some fiendishly baffling clues.
The format is, you have 60 minutes to solve three cryptic puzzles, each comprising 30 answers. And as you sit waiting to start, in a room on the 17th floor of the Times’ HQ near London Bridge with nearly 100 others, it’s like being in school exams again.
Especially when the guy at the front says: “You may begin,” and you turn over the first page and…
1) It’s scary. You look at the first few clues and can’t solve any. It’s just like starting a business; you ask yourself what you are doing here, you look around at everybody else and they all look right at home. You even feel an urge to chuck it in and walk away.
2) Stay calm. This is when you remind yourself you have done this thing before, you have every right to be here, you can cope. You have to dig in a bit and keep believing in yourself. Then you start writing in a few answers and the fear subsides.
3) Stick at it. There is no substitute for perseverance. One of the things I like about solving crosswords is the mixture of art and science. Yes, as a copywriter I’m good with words but I can be a problem-solver too. Like a business challenge, you look at a clue several different ways and, gradually or suddenly, an answer appears.
4) You’ve got this. Halfway through the third puzzle it all starts to flow. I’m enjoying this. I’ve left behind the self-doubt; I can do this. I go back to the first puzzle and all those clues I left blank on the first pass are now solvable.
5) Celebrate successes. I got the first and third puzzles all right. The one in the middle remained uncompleted; I just couldn’t pick up its wavelength. But overall I got 80 clues out of 90 and I’m 51st out of 88 in the room. That’s not bad for someone who doesn’t get a chance to do crosswords as often as I used to.
6) What’s next? Always learn and always have actions arising. If I want to do better next year, clearly I need to practise more and go back to doing at least one crossword a day.
But where will I find the time? After all, I’ve got a business to run…
* It’s now 35 years since a seminal collection of baseball essays entitled “How life imitates the World Series” was published, so I think I’ll get away with borrowing the title.