Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

by Shane Parrish

If you play poker, you learn this intuitively. You’re dealt a hand based mostly on luck. Feeling sorry for yourself, complaining about the hand you were dealt, or blaming others for how they played their hands only distracts you from what you can control. Your responsibility is to play the hand as best you can.

While no one chooses difficult circumstances, adversity provides opportunity. It allows us to test ourselves, and see who we’ve become.

When circumstances are easy, it’s hard to distinguish ordinary people from extraordinary ones, or to see the extraordinary within ourselves. As the Roman slave Publilius Syrus once said, “Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm.”[*]