Play Your Hand
By Jay Forte, Humanetrics LLC - Published in Personal Excellence, May 2008
The cards have been dealt; the ones you received are yours. Your challenge is to play your best hand and to win. There are no guarantees in your hand – you get what you get. But how you play your cards determines the quality of the game. This is the analogy of life…we are given a hand to play; this hand includes our talents, interests, attitudes, environments, families and other factors. This is what we are dealt. Our responsibility is to create a winning hand - an extraordinary life - from these cards.
We are each given a unique combination of gifts, talents, creativity and thinking; whether it is attributable to genetics or divine inspiration, each of us arrive on the planet with the potential for a winning hand and an extraordinary life. The composition of the hand sets the stage for our movement through life. The hand includes talents, natural gifts and thinking. It also includes our parents, ethnicity, location, attitudes, skills and environments. Each component has the ability of adding value to our hand; its success is in how it is used. It is up to us to see the areas of value and exploit them and to minimize the weaker areas or find ways to turn them to strengths. And we are the only players that matter –it is our script, it is our life.
Though each of us has the potential to use all that is around us and in us to create a winning hand, few people actively play their hand. Most people spend time complaining about what they have been dealt - parents who did not provide enough, care enough or inspire enough; companies that under used, under paid or under rewarded; kids that were ungrateful, disrespectful or insensitive. They focus is on what is missing instead of what is provided.
There is no guarantee of a wining hand. Affluence does not create success, nor does a loving family. They are just the factors and components of our situations. We frequently expect others to make our lives easy, to eliminate problems, to give us what we need without working for it. We soon learn to expect that our parents will do our work for us. We soon learn to expect that our companies will always provide for us. And when this does not happen, we start to blame, find fault and throw the responsibility for our life and our unhappiness on others.
Our happiness or unhappiness is ours – we own it; our success or failure is in how we play our cards, not in the cards that we have. There are heartwarming stories of people who have overcome substantial odds to change the cards they were dealt – the teenager who stood strong against gangs and neighborhood poverty to leave and make a difference in college and in life. Or, the child of alcoholic parents that learned to love them in their humanity despite the miserable home conditions. Or the woman employee who continues to work with extreme effort, loved and respected by her customers, despite being by passed over for promotions because she is a woman and a single parent.
Hardship exists to test our strengths. It shows us that we have amazing abilities and capabilities. Nothing ever really worthwhile comes without effort. Hardships help us learn to be strong; they also help us appreciate the portions of our life that come easily.
So think of your hand as all “opportunity.” We have an obligation to create the most amazing life regardless of what we have been dealt. Life is not a dress rehearsal; we do not get to live this life again. It is therefore up to us to develop it, invent it, maximize it and live it in the best and highest possible way. We arrived on the planet with nothing; our lives have value only when we add it. We each arrive on the planet with enough gifts to develop a truly extraordinary life. We have talents to be developed, we have unlimited creativity, we have nearly limitless potential. We must learn through the process of life that our gifts are to be developed and that our hand is to be played. That requires great thought, imagination and energy. It may require help from others; but if that does not exist, then we must see the strength in ourselves and move ahead.
In all cases, how we play the hand is up to each of us. At the end, we do not have the right to blame others for the lives we have or don’t have. We are each dealt the cards of life…some strong, some weak. The strong ones help us develop our confidence and esteem. The weak ones teach us how to work, handle setbacks, struggle and learn. The combination allows for a powerful life – one we completely own. So check your cards. See the power in your hand (talents) and play to them. See the weakness in your hand and address it. Own your hand. Own your life.
©2008 Humanetrics LLC. All rights reserved.