Play the Hand You're Dealt

Welcome to the Shrink's Blog. It's exciting to join this new technology, so thought I'd kick it off with a breif article I wrote about how to get the most out of your life opportunities. See if you don't realize some idle opportunities in you Life Hand.



Play the Hand You’re Dealt


We’ve all heard this saying before. It’s a motivational phrase that means to make the most out of what you have. I’ve always considered it a pretty simple concept, but lately I’ve seen ways that add more depth to this motivational cliché.


Your First Deal

We all grow up with a combination of genetic traits, positive and negative experiential events, and life lessons that develop into what I call your First Deal and represents the beginning of your Life Hand. This combination of good and bad cards is what you carry into adulthood. I’ll define adulthood as the moment when you begin taking full responsibility for yourself. It can be recognized as the point where you first begin to consider how to play your hand, rather than let it play you.


Drawing and Discarding

Since nobody has defined this “Life Hand”, I will go by the assumption that you can have as many or as few cards in it as you wish. The weakest, laziest, least motivated people will ultimately end up with a small hand consisting of only the negative, limiting cards. The strongest, most optimistic and successful will have a huge hand with cards sorted into many values within a number of suits.

Drawing cards happens when you add something to your life. It can be positive, such as education, a new talent or skill, a new thing or a new relationship; or it can be negative like a vice, negative habit pattern, or other limiting form of thinking. Discards are made when you consciously overcome a habit, drop a negative belief or make any other kind of life-changing decision. While most discards relate to decisions to drop or change an under-producing area in your life, you might also discard a positive card as a way of prioritizing or balancing your life at a particular time, a sacrificial decision, or it could be an accident or act of carelessness where a card is allowed to get away.


Playing Your Cards

Playing your cards can be seen as using an acquired or natural ability, either good or bad. If you get a college degree, then take a job in that area of expertise, you are playing that skill card, or perhaps several cards you’ve been preparing around this goal. However, if a criminal decided to rob a bank, he or she is playing a negative skill card and a risk card by conscious choice, too.

A card played from the hand of life normally is played without giving it away, something like laying down three of a kind in a game of Rummy. You still own the cards and can play off of them again later. Some cards however are lost when played. These would be things that are irreplaceable, perhaps health-related cards, tangible object cards or relationship cards that are lost forever.


Your Hand Changes Over Time

When you first reach the age of responsibility and become aware that you have a hand to play, it’s small and filled mostly with cards dealt to you by others that you received without choice. Over time, as you consciously add and discard, your hand becomes larger, more complex and more definitive of your life in the present. If you take the time to stop and look at your hand in total, it would give you a good idea of what you will achieve and accomplish in the future, too, but many of us fail to do that. Your hand becomes what you want it to be or accept it to be and will formulate your actions going forward. As Napoleon Hill said, “You get what you think about most of the time”, and what you think about and value most will be your hand.


The Success Hand

The more successful you become, the more cards you acquire. The danger, however, is that there is a point where you simply can’t hold all of your cards and view them equally. When this happens, you begin to sort them into groups by type and priority. They’re all still there, but you tend to view many of them by category rather than individually. A good example of this is your My Documents folder on your computer. Mine is made up of a number of subject folders, each holding a bunch of files, along with a list of loose, independent files that don’t go in a specific folder.


Optimizing Your Hand

Here’s where it begins to get exciting. How do you get the most value out of a hand that’s big and full of more things, information and tools than you can use? We need a better sorting and accessing system, or many of the cards will not be used to their full potential. One suggestion is to periodically purge your hand, discarding, trading or reinvigorating cards that have not been used in a while. Perhaps a “Sort by Modified” option, like we have in Microsoft Windows would be handy. Or use the suggestion of the wardrobe consultants – if you haven’t worn it in the past year, consider tossing it.


This exercise will yield a group of cards that have value, contain investment, and still hold some interest, but are not being used right now. Here’s where it gets tough, because we only have so many hours each day to play cards. You need to review this group and do one of three things:

Discard and realize that your simply have higher priorities
Play it in place of another card that is no longer as relevant, interesting or profitable at this time.
Lend it, share it or give it away to someone who can make better use of it; or perhaps even help you get some residual value from it.


The Value of Your Hand Goes Up Over Time

Because your hand includes all of the things you’ve invested time, money and effort in during your life, it is worth more than the sum of the individual cards. Many synergies are in your hand, some not realized yet, but there is potential value none the less. Go through your hand using the three criteria above and then lay out just the #3 cards. These represent the latent value of your Life Hand that is sitting fallow and may yield substantial rewards with minimal effort on your part. Perhaps they’ll be financial, but they could also be the seeds of another type of personal fulfillment . . . physical, spiritual, emotional, etc.

I submit to you that there are opportunities in front of you right now that could be taken advantage of by playing one of these valuable, but underused cards, that will add significantly to your life without taking additional time from your current activities.


Play Your Hand Fully Before You Fold

There’s only one way to Fold in the game of life and most of us don’t pick the time; (some do, but they are not usually the ones with many positive cards left in their hand, anyway). Set a goal of playing as many cards as possible before you fold, so that when that day comes, your hand is left with only the most important, valuable and meaningful cards. I envision this to be a hand of face cards, because in the end, it all comes down to the people in life who you’ve loved and who’ve been loved by you.