A bit of advice I got from a poker player, you should always bet the cards in your hand, not the cards you hope to get. Now I do not quite understand that, but I guess the logic makes sense. I have no hope of ever being good at poker. I will stick with chess. However, there is one key principal at play here. At any given moment, any given day, you have to deal with what is in front of you. If you are constantly waiting for the next card, the next improvement, the new this or the new that then you are just not going to make much improvement. You will always be waiting. You will be waiting for tomorrow on the day that you die.
Rather that thinking of what you do not have and making plans for what you will do once that you have it, think only of what you have right now. What action can I take right now with what I have? It is like the morning that I started running. I decided to just become a runner. I was in a hotel room. I only had a pair of boxers, one t-shirt and a pair of dress shoes. Well that is what I had. I ran my first mile, down the 18th green at a golf course wearing dress shoes. I did not have running shoes, or socks. I did not have running clothes, or fancy music listening devices. I did not have any of the running geek things. I just bet the cards in my hand and ran my first mile.
Everyday when you wake up, you have the cards that you were dealt that day. No sense in focusing on what you do not have, focus on what you can do with what you have. That is how progress is made. Anyone can dream up what they need, but very few people create with what they have. An engineer in my employ once told me that he could not possibly engineer what I was asking him to do because he did not have the right equipment. He then rolled out a long list of new and fancy gear he would need to to accomplish the task at hand. I realized that he was not really engineering anything at that point. Real engineering is making something work with what resources are available. That is hard. Coming up with a wish list is easy.
Same thing with ideas. I can come up with the idea of greatness, in fact I am pretty good at it. However, you can only be great if you just starting being great with what you have. So bet the cards in your hand.
Guy Reams
