Recently, I was watching Martin Scorsese's film about Bob Dylan. Dylan is sharper still than he appears, yet even he admits his good fortune. Even awed by it--which makes him very okay in my book as few ever want to admit that they were lucky to be successful. (However, more are willing to admit that they were lucky than failures are to admit they were unlucky, so let's not go too far in praising his humility.) All Dylan wanted to be was a song writer, he said. He has no idea why his songs became "the anthem of a generation." Personally, I don't either and I lived through it, too. He can't and couldn't sing worth a lick. He's a mediocre musician. Much of his lyrics are incomprehensible crap, with at most one line out of thousands that had any real meaning and mostly what could be read into. It was nothing more than luck. Pure outhouse luck. Bob Dylan had to be the luckiest man who ever walked the planet. Ever.
Now, since we all know the law of averages, if there is someone so unbelievably lucky, then there must be someone as equally UNlucky. That would be me.
I had to play poker seriously to realize just how unlucky I am. I've never been good at math. I never studied statistics. I never understood probabilities. (Still don't, to be honest.) But, I have at least a glimmer in my mind about them, and probabilities are everywhere. I envy the MIT guys. Life must be much easier for them. Simply, there is no way I could have been this unsuccessful without having been saddled with carrying all of Bob Dylan's bad luck. It's enough to make one believe in past lives carrying over into this life.
Am I whining? Probably. Am I boring? No doubt. But, poker requires so much luck that it makes one really think about it, despite our natural unwillingness to do sot. We don't want to believe in luck at all. Our minds can't handle it. There's a very simple reason why we don't: we can't control it.
We don't want to accept anything we can't control. We find it impossible to accept as fact that all our hard work can be undone by a factor which we can't control. We put our faith in numbers--the long run, the law of averages, what goes around comes around, that it all evens out. What if it doesn't? Scary stuff, huh?
Playing poker has given me an insight into my own bad fortune, made me really take a long hard look at luck. Believe me, I'd much rather blame my own mistakes as then I'd have a chance to correct them. Then, I'd have control. I'd be the captain of my own ship, the master of my destiny. But, I'm not. I have no more control over my life in the long run than I had at the moment of my conception. It sucks, honestly, but there it is.
What I can control is my acceptance. I can accept that I'm not a lucky person. To be a success at anything, I must overcome my propensity to lose to someone luckier. I have to overcome myself--my mistakes, bad choices, bad decisions, and all of the past--and my bad luck. Call it kharma if you like. Or fate. Or luck. Or bummer.
Or you can call it whining. Or mistakenly blame it on my refusal to blame myself. Those would be mistakes. I would prefer not to blame the forces of the Universe. I'd prefer to have more control over my life. Perhaps believing I had control led to more mistakes, or I compounded bad luck with mistakes, but we all make mistakes and most of us learn from them. Or I'm just plain stupid, which is also surely a possibility.
If you're going to play a game in which success is so dependent on luck, then it helps to be lucky. When luck is going against you, it helps to know it's luck and go on from there. It's a tough game, either way, lucky or not. But, as they say, poker is like life, and it's shockingly truer than we might ever think. The harder you work, the luckier you get, to a point. Whether you can accept that may be the difference between being miserable or okay. Ultimately, that's what you want to be. Just okay. Happiness is a fleeting moment. Satisfied is an end. Okay is a level you must struggle to maintain and is worth the enormous effort it takes to stay there.
My only misery now is knowing how hard it is to stay okay. Since starting to write this, I've gotten back to okay. I know I'm unlucky and can handle it, as I have no choice but to handle it or rail against it. The next time you feel unlucky, rail against it, then work hard to get back to okay. Turn it loose. Let it out. Scream, cry, go stark raving lunatic. Then, blame it on luck and let it go. You can't beat it. You can't get away from it. You can only accept it, then say, deal the next hand. And pray that the law of averages evens out. After all, you can't lose all of 'em, right?
CJ
look on the bright side...