After A Viral Fail, Wheel of Fortune's Pat Sajak Gives Us the Wisdom We All Need

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Here’s a question I love asking: What am I missing?

Sometimes we think we understand a situation, simply because we heard a fact or watched a minute. But what if we do not understand? What if there is something we are missing — and if we had that information, we’d be far smarter for it?

This can be applied in big ways and small. And a perfect example just came from — of all places — this week’s Wheel of Fortune.

Maybe you caught the moment, which blew up online. The contestants were trying to finish this puzzle:

The answer, which may seem obvious, is ANOTHER FEATHER IN YOUR CAP.

But for two agonizing minutes, the contestants on this show could not figure it out. They guessed all sorts of things. A feather in your lap? A feather in your map?

People on Twitter went nuts. Everyone from local TV news to CNN ran a segment on it. Celebrities including Josh Gad and Darren Rovell piled on. The New York Post reported this:

The Post story framed it as Wheel of Fortune “continuing a long series of controversial on air moments,” which calls into question the Post’s understanding of controversy. But all the same: For the contestants on this show, whose names were quickly circulated on social media, this was very embarrassing. One of them was even a high school dean of students.

Then the show's host Pat Sajak weighed in on Twitter, with the dose of understanding that nobody else seemed able to muster.

He began:

Then Pat explained what went wrong — because after decades of hosting this show, he understands how contestants think and react under pressure.

His explanation went like this:

The first attempted solve was ‘Feather in your hat’ which, by the way, is how a lot of people say it. So all three players thought it was a good solve, and were stunned when I said it was wrong.Now imagine you’re on national TV, and you’re suddenly thrown a curve and you begin getting worried about looking stupid, and if the feather isn’t in your hat, where the heck can it be? You start flailing away looking for alternatives rather than synonyms for ‘hat.’

Here I should pause and say: If you have never been in front of television cameras, you really cannot imagine the experience of anyone who has. It warps time. When I do a TV segment, I literally have no idea how long time is elapsing. Was I talking for 10 seconds? An hour? It’s impossible to know. And this isn’t just me. I remember following Sarah Michelle Gellar through an appearance she made on a daytime talk show, back when I was writing a story about her company, and she told me she always feels disoriented afterward. Did she say the right things? Did she forget anything? The segment could have been 10 minutes long, but it felt like it happened in a blink.

This stuff is hard. It’s a lot easier to just tweet about it.

Anyway, back to what Pat Sajak wrote in his Twitter thread:

And, of course, when it’s solved, you want to crawl in a hole. I’ve been praised online for “keeping it together” and not making fun of the players. Truth is, all I want to do is help to get them through it and convince them that those things happen even to very bright people.

Then Pat chastised everyone for mocking them online.

These are good people in a bad situation under a kind of stress that you can’t begin to appreciate from the comfort of your couch. Good-natured laughter is one thing. Heck, they laughed at themselves. But, hey, cut them some slack. Unless you’re there, you have no idea how different it is in the studio.

I loved this response, which of course did not get nearly the same attention as the original video did. He’s right about it all, but the most important insight was the psychology of the players.

If we go back to my question — what am I missing? — then we now have the answer. Here's what everyone was missing: Someone on the show already guessed the puzzle in a way that seemed correct, and the contestants, when they learned that the guess was wrong, felt totally lost and were looking for possible alternatives rather than synonyms of the original guess.

Maybe we’re not all as smart as we like to think we are.

But that’s OK! When we recognize a lapse in understanding, that's a good moment to ask ourselves that question: What am I missing?

Then we become genuinely smarter.

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Cover credit: Wheel of Fortune