We'll take Important Life Lessons, Alex, for all the marbles
Everything you need to know about succeeding in life is taught on Jeopardy!, including the inevitability in a television age of, one day, being heartsick over losing someone you've never met.
And so, in light of the demise of host Alex Trebek, who we are clutching tight as one of our own in Ottawa, let us ponder the lessons from the greatest game show ever made.
1. It pays to be smart, if we ever settle on what that even means. Is a person “smart” because they retain and can instantly recall mountains of trivial information about the solar system? And is information the same as knowledge? It is not hard to image that Einstein would have been terrible on Jeopardy! and it helps to remind ourselves that James Holzhauer, one of the game's greatest players, is a professional gambler, not a nuclear physicist or a brain surgeon. Intellectuals may have bigger brains and better libraries, but smart people have more fun, probably make more money and know a hell of a lot more about The Batchelorette.
2. Timing is everything. You've no doubt seen those contestants who can't seem to master the buzzer and click it furiously, always a split-second off, jerking their fist up and down, like the impatient rider clicking the elevator button over and over. Calm down, Karen from Nebraska. We can see the panic on your face. Follow Alex's cue, find your clicking groove and don't let us see you sweat. Putting your hand up at just the right time, learning not to interrupt the answer: aren't those lessons for the ages and U.S. elections?
3. Don't be afraid to innovate.
The game, typically, is played in the same, cautious way. Contestants usually start with the easier questions, pick up the feel of the category, then make their way down the board to the tougher answers, which carry a bigger prize. Makes sense. But enter the disrupters. Lots have tried it, but no one was better than Holzhauer at throwing convention, literally, upside down: he would often start at the bottom, at the toughest question, then hunt and peck his way through the board looking for valuable Daily Doubles, which he was very good at maximizing. Lesson? Understand how the pack works, then don't follow. Colour outside the lines sometimes.
4. Learn how to gamble, but craftily. So many things in life are a kind of bet, are they not? What to study, who to marry, where to work, whether to get a neck tattoo. So, so many choices. When it comes to betting on Daily Doubles, you can see the cautious ones, frowns on their faces, afraid to go “all in” because, damn it, that's reckless and so not how we roll back at the reference library in Iowa. Ah, but there's that old saying about the kid who never had a chance because he never took a chance. Making risky bets. Is it not the only way great things happen, like riches or incarceration?
5. Understand the nature of luck. You may well be a genius — and leading the game — but when “Rivers of Bulgaria” or “State Capitals With a U” come up in Final Jeopardy, just accept it isn't your day and you're going home with a steak knife set and a handshake from Alex. It's a lot like life. The only reason I have this job, for instance, is that the managing editor of the day, the incomparable Nelson Skuce, grew up on the street where I lived, a fact I did not know as I mumbled away in his office. There was, and this is not false modesty, no other reason to give me a two-week tryout as a “copy boy,” as the job was once known. Luck is awesome, except when it's really bad, and we're all to be handed lots of each.
6. Be civil, be kind, be generous. As far as we know, there has never been a fist fight on Jeopardy! or an explosion of anger, with the tone being set by the old smooth-ie, Trebek himself. Win or lose, shake hands, congratulate your opponent, be gracious no matter the outcome, keep the insults to yourself, join Alex in the middle for a group hug. And give back, like Trebek so generously did with his alma mater, the University of Ottawa.
7. Nothing lasts forever, you only think it will. Rest in peace, AT.