I generally try not to write about current events, but I’m on a plane and this is my damn blog so you get what you get. Also, I think this is important: stick with me all the way to the end.

This week, I attended the National Spelling Bee, which has to be the single most relentlessly kid-positive event I’ve ever seen. I’ll admit that I went in expecting pageant parents and high pressure, and the latter is certainly true: there is no doubt that after coming from a pool of 11 million participants, making it to the final 250 and being live telecast on ESPN is nerve wracking.

But what was so awesome, and so unexpected, was how aware the adults were and how well they kept the focus on the kids. They hired genuinely funny Hollywood writers to make great “Use it in a sentence” retorts, with the net effect of breaking the tension for kids at the most stressful moments. When kids misspell a word and thus are eliminated, their parents meet their kids at the side of the stage with a hug. Being there, you get the sense that everyone is more focused on making this a successful, supportive experience for the kids than they are on actually having a competition.

I’m sure there are pageant parents in there and that there is plenty of politics and drama and the like. But the Spelling Bee really does feels like geek summer camp. The kids get yearbooks with a page for each of them and run around getting autographs from each other. The older kids and the cool kids are acknowledged, but generally humble and very warm towards the younger and the geekier. I saw at least one crush (and one of the pair was a semifinalist, so even more suspense). There is a dance on Friday night. There is near-constant high fiving.

If anything, the worst thing about the Bee isn’t at the Bee – it is what happens in the outside world. The sports fans who complain about missing a night of punditry on ESPN. The folks who take to Twitter and moan about how none of the finalists are ever Americans (just for reference, every semifinalist but one was an American this year, and they were black, white, brown, asian, and of both genders; just because you’re not white doesn’t mean you aren’t American).

Lameness happens and I can accept that. But one that bothered me in particular was a woman who said it was no longer interesting once the girls got out. I asked her if she would say the same thing if all the white kids got out, trying to point out that statements we make about gender wouldn’t be as acceptable if we translated them to race. Which caused her to try to explain to me the plight of women, particularly gender wage equity (which I found particularly funny, because I actually link to GetRaised.com in my Twitter profile). She even suggested that I would be the kind to use the word misandry on a frequent basis.

And of course, it is a big week for those kind of discussions. Because #YesAllWomen and, to be honest, #YesAllMen. Because everyone has made someone feel uncomfortable at some point. And because we’re all stupid assholes some of the time – that, at least, doesn’t seem to be split along gender lines.

But what always troubles me a bit about tragedies is that they make it difficult to question the prevailing voices. I’m very for cheering on women; I just sponsored prizes for a woman-focused hackathon out of my own pocket. But I’m not for saying they are the only reason to watch something. Not because I’m afraid of creating a bunch of misandrists but because I think that statements like “I’m no longer watching because the girls are out” feed the misogynists.

To me, the way to react to Elliot Rodger’s actions isn’t to emphasize a mental illness or the social forces that affect women. Mental illness and those forces are important, and need to be recognized, and I don’t want to silence women who need to speak out in order to feel better. But for sheer productivity, I can’t help but remember the story of C. P. Ellis, who was 53 when Studs Terkel interviewed him.

Ellis was an exalted cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, who grew up poor and felt shut out of American mainstream. He join the Klan to get a sense of belonging and before long, was rising in the leadership and showing up at town hall meetings with weapons tucked into his belt, hurling violent obscenities at the blacks who were pushing for integration.

That could have been in it; that could have been Ellis’ entire story and his entire life. His rage could have escalated to violence and he could have been Elliot Rodger: someone who felt pushed out and found someone else (importantly, someone also disempowered) to push back on.

But then something interesting happened: Ellis was invited to a working group of people from all walks of life asked to make recommendations on how to deal with racial problems. Instead of shunning him, part of the community reached out and said “even if we don’t agree with your opinions, we respect that you have them and we want to listen and work together to move forward”. Ellis was elected co-chair of the committee, alongside a black woman he hated. And by working with her and talking and moving forward an inch at a time, he left the Klan and became a staunch advocate not only of racial integration but on fighting for the rights of mostly-black union workers who lived in the poverty he knew so well.

Why can’t that be our reaction? Is this a moment where, instead of going to Twitter and saying “I’m not watching because the girls are gone”, we can find the places where misogynists cluster and actually listen to how they feel. Respect, if not their opinions, at least their feelings and their personhood and help them feel a little more included?

When you read Rodger’s writings, he couldn’t have put it more clearly: he felt he was on the outside, looking in. Without excusing his actions, without embracing his beliefs, the challenge is now ours. Can we put aside our own righteous anger in the interest of making progress? Can we take a moment and remember C. P. Ellis?

I admit it: I don’t actually mean the title of this article literally. Risks are great but only when built on a foundation of knowing what the heck you are doing. Yet big bets when the moment is right are not only the only way to beat the house, they’re also critical to human happiness and advancement. And the moment is right far more often than we think.

Take a recent example of a Netflix customer service employee. “Captain” Mike took a risk: instead of offering normal customer service, he went the zany route and answered a customer support chat using a Star Trek roleplay. Which sounds weird but he pulls it off well and clearly the customer was pleased. Point for Mike: take a job where you are free to take the kind of bets you like to take and have a reasonable expectation they might pay off.

But let’s draw the flip side: maybe it didn’t work He could have drawn the sourpuss who just wanted it fixed without the cuteness. Customer could have complained and then it is up to Mike’s boss, who might have decided that customer service reps are a dime a dozen and kicked him to the curb. Which comes to the second point of Mike: work for people who will back the risks you take.

Even with a good boss, though, you can still get fired for a risk that goes badly. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a risk and some jobs are like that – there are times when you really only get one big bet and if the cards don’t go your way, you bust and have to walk away. Which brings us to the third point of Mike: there is a difference between betting your job and betting your career. Let’s say this went the wrong way: customer complains, Mike gets fired from Netflix. He bets his job, he loses.

He wouldn’t, however, have been out of a career. Because there are companies that do appreciate that kind of customer service (like, apparently, Netflix) and while he certainly would have lost wages and had to deal with a transition, Mike still would have ended up on his feet in his chosen field. There is a huge difference between betting your table stakes for today and betting your entire life savings.
And that’s grand master Mike (can you tell I haven’t been sleeping much) point number four: rewards. Because none of that bad stuff actually happened. He was a geek and the customer loved it and so did the internet and now Mike made Netflix shine like grain alcohol. Bonus. Promotion. Boom!

Except that’s not really the boom. The real boom is that in risking your job in pursuit of doing meaningful things, you not only widen the possibility that the bet itself will payoff in customer happiness/salary/title but you also get work worth doing. Meaning is the single most valuable currency in the workplace, and far and away does more to increase individual happiness than wages.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote something that can be imperfectly summarized as “the world is a good place and worth fighting for.” Sometimes, the Mikes get fired; the world isn’t perfect. But it is good and it is worth fighting for. Because if you’re not providing the best service you know how to, if you’re not risking when the moment is there, then you’re suggesting that the world isn’t worth betting big on. And who wants to live in a world like that?

I spend less than two minutes choosing what to wear every morning. And I spend less on clothes in a year than most people in my income bracket do in a quarter. And I do it all by satisficing.

To start, I wear basically the same thing every day. Levi’s 514 33/34 jeans in a dark wash, a Nordstrom Trim Fit 15 34/35 shirt in a neutral color and pattern, a pair of 11.5 D cowboy boots (black or brown) and matching leather belt, and a John Varvatos 40R blazer (or, if it is warm enough, a vest). It works for most any weather, is formal enough that you can go onstage and give a talk but informal enough that you don’t have to worry about dry cleaning. A night on a hanger followed by the shower trick will unwrinkle everything enough to look decent (though that may be because my standards are lax).

But standardization is about more than just not having to pick what to wear every morning. The list above also helps me shop: I have automated searches on eBay that mail me each morning with things that are the right size and the right price. If a John Varvatos 40R blazer sold for less than $40 on eBay in the last year, chance are I bought it. This actually has a variety of benefits. One, its cheap. Two, it makes me less attached to the things I own. Rip a shirt while travelling? Leave it behind – it only cost $10. Third, I’m big on the “reuse” portion of the “reuse-reduce-recycle” triangle, so that’s a bonus. And obviously, it saves me a ton of money.

But the real advantage is in the cognitive savings. The one true limited resource in life is our mental energy: time and money are essentially just proxies for what we are required to spend our cognitive resources on. And for some, clothes may actually be something they want to spend resources on. It may be an important part of their identity or bring them genuine happiness. But for me, skipping out on the mental energy of clothing means I get to spend more mind on things I actually do care about.

And that’s the bit that people most often miss out on. We have a tendency to let social standards tell us what things are worth spending our mental energy on. Wearing the same thing is “boring” and it means that we are boring. But in reality, there is very little more interesting than spending time on your interests. If your interest is fashion, then apply this to whatever part of your life isn’t: food is another area ripe for satisficing (my trick: ask if the other person is deciding between two things, tell them you’ll order whichever they don’t pick so they can get a bit of both). So are electronics: just ask the expert in your life and then take their recommendation. I don’t know about speakers, I don’t want to know about speakers, so I call Sound Man Dave and he says “get those” and I do it. Which frees me to go think about choosing very specific computer parts, a topic I am passionate about and do enjoy maximizing on.

So if you see me at a conference someday, wearing the exact outfit described above, don’t be surprised. I might be a bit frumpy, slightly wrinkled and ill-fitted, but that just means that I spent my mind somewhere else. Feel free to ask me about what I did instead; it might be interesting.