Getting dealt a bad hand isn't your fault. What you do with it is entirely yours.
Worth reading alongside this
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by Randomness takes the core premise here — that life is poker rather than chess — and pushes it further than most people find comfortable. It's a cold look at how much of what we call skill is actually luck wearing a convincing disguise.
Annie Duke's Thinking in Bets is where the chess-versus-poker framing comes from, written by someone who spent two decades as a professional player after training as a cognitive psychologist.
You already know life isn't fair.
Maybe even while reading this, something is running underneath: 'why am I this unlucky? Same effort, and it worked for them and not for me.'
That feeling isn't wrong. Genuinely unfair things happen constantly.
This isn't going to argue otherwise. The opposite — it takes the unfairness as given, and asks what the strongest available move is from inside it.
Picture someone at a poker table. The cards come and they're terrible. Hands tighten. Anger rises. 'Why me.' The anger is completely understandable. And for as long as it holds their attention, they're losing.
Most people believe life is chess. Same board, same pieces, complete information, and effort reliably wins. Reality doesn't work that way. Life is far closer to poker. Everyone starts with different cards, luck is real, and none of it is fair.
So what do you do?
If you can't control the cards, control the decisions.
Those accumulate, and eventually they're your life.