Bet On Yourself
There’s no way to know how the cards will be dealt. You don’t get to see the hand coming. You just get it good, bad, stacked, or thin and you have to decide what you’re going to do with it.
There will be times when folding feels like the only option. When the smart move, the safe move, the move everybody would understand, is to lay it down. I’ve been there. I know that feeling.
That’s just not in me.
Deal me the worst hand, stack the chips against me, and I’m going to find a way to win. I need people to hear that correctly that’s not arrogance.
That’s confidence. There’s a difference, and most people confuse the two because they’ve never had to sit with a hand bad enough to know which one they’d reach for.
Most will never truly understand the life I live. The things I’ve dealt with, and the things I still deal with, day in and day out, quietly, while everyone sees the version of me that shows up anyway. My poker face won’t give any of it away. Not because I’m tough. Not because I’m sneaky. Not because I’m clueless to how bad it’s actually been.
It’s simply because I was dealt the cards I was dealt, and I decided a long time ago I wasn’t going to make excuses for the hand in front of me.
That doesn’t mean I’ve played every hand right. I haven’t. There are hands I misread. Bets I made that set me back years, not days. Moments I look back on and know, clearly, I could have played it smarter. Every one of those lost hands taught me something I needed to win the next one. That’s the whole game. You don’t get to skip the losses and still understand how to win.
There is no shame in failure. There is no shame in losing. Losing is just information, it’s the game telling you something you didn’t know yet. But quitting is different. Quitting is a cowardly move, and that’s not who I am, and it’s not who I’m raising my kids to be either.
Stack the deck against me and I’ll still find a way to win. And if someone looks at that and calls it arrogance, they simply don’t know me. They don’t know what it costs to keep showing up with a straight face when the hand you were dealt would break most people.
Here’s what I actually believe: this confidence in self is God given. It’s not something reserved for a few people who got lucky or built different. It’s in all of us. We are powerful beyond measure the second we stop letting distraction, insecurity, and fear make our decisions for us.
You don’t need a good hand to win. You need to stop folding on yourself before the hand’s even played out.
Bet on yourself.
trying.