EP. 155 - Playing Your Cards Right in the Game of Life | Further Your Lifestyle Podcast

Speaker 1: 0:00

Yo yo yo. Welcome back to the Further your Lifestyle podcast conversations on lifestyle passions and hustles. My name's Chris, I'm your host and I'm super excited to be back here having the conversation with you. Episode 155 today and kind of coming off last week's episode where we dove into. You know, how can we further our lifestyle with Taylor Swift?

Speaker 1: 0:19

I actually wanted to do a similar episode on another song, but actually this time, what can we learn from Kenny Rogers the Gambler? And this one actually took me by surprise as well. I know, actually, look, I have a confession to make Never really listened to his music, even though he's, you know, quite an icon, I believe. And when I listened to the song the Gambler, I think that's what it's called. I better make sure that I'm not butchering this. I'm actually looking this up live as we're talking yeah, the Gambler, and for some reason I thought it was just called the Gamble, but it's called the Gambler, and really I wanted to ask the question of you know, what does old mate Kenny have to say about life, and what can we learn, or what are the lessons that we can learn from this song? And I've been listening to it while running and, you know, look, it talks about, obviously, poker and things like that, but I think there's so much here that we can learn about our lives and how we further our lifestyles, and some life lessons and life advice. It's not just relevant to poker, but there's a parallel story here and I've gone through and I think I've got look, it's probably more than six points that I've taken from this song that I wanted to really take you guys through and really challenge you. And if you haven't listened to the song, I would encourage you go listen up Kenny Rogers the Gambler, have a listen to it and then we'll talk about it. And that's what I'm going to talk about today. So we're going to roll the intro and get into it.

Speaker 1: 1:45

So the song the Gambler again, I can't play it here because I would be, you know, against copyright, but it's very catchy, you know. It's got a bit of a beat to it and it really is a metaphor of life wrapped up into a whole bunch of different poker game lessons. It talks about this old gambler that imparts wisdom to a younger guy during a late night train ride, or I think it is an actual game, I can't remember, but basically it dwells into the broader themes applicable to his life's journeys and for me, listening to it, I think it's just so relevant that we can listen to something like this and we can play back and actually look at it from the lens of life and how do we further our lifestyles? And that's really what I wanted to do here. So the first one is and these are all part of the lyrics, I'm just pulling parts of the lyrics and the first one is know when to hold them. And this is really important.

Speaker 1: 2:32

When you're playing poker, you need to know when to hold. You know, not actually go through and lose your money, but I'm not going to bet, I'm just going to hold and see it through. And I think this is really important because when we recognize and we leverage our strengths this is what I've taken from it In life this means we're understanding that our talents and when to apply them to achieve our goals. And, on the contrary, there's also the perspective of like. We also know when to be quiet and know when to just hold your ground. Just because there's something there, you know something shiny, doesn't mean you take action on it. Wait, see, see, see if it's going to play out, wait a little bit. There's that whole theory about. There's something that you see in a shop before you buy it, you know, wait on it for 30 days, do you still want it? Then go buy it. But when we recognize and leverage our strengths, you know, we know when we can leverage them and put them into work.

Speaker 1: 3:25

But I think the real big message here is actually know when to take action, know when to pull back, know when to just kind of see it out, so know when to hold them. That's the first one. The next one is know when to fold them right. So in the game of you know poker, obviously you can fold and call it quits and step away. This is simple enough to know that. We need to learn when to accept and learn from our failures, because they're going to happen regardless. It's going to be something in life that's going to come regardless. But knowing when to let go of what isn't working, it allows us to conserve energy and resources for potentially more promising opportunities. And knowing when to call it right. And that kind of leads to the next one, which is know when to walk away. So when to walk away from a game or not to buy back in. But really this is talking about knowing when to set the boundary of that's enough.

Speaker 1: 4:16

Walking away from situations that no longer serve a growth to your essential personal development and I've done this a few times, you know. Cut people out of my life, not in a rude way, but just. You know, when you surround yourself with people, you are a version of them. If you've got five people in your life, you are of each. You're five versions of those different people, and that's what molds you into one. So I think we need to be very careful of who we surround ourselves with, but know when to walk away from situations or environments.

Speaker 1: 4:45

That the next one is know when to run. Now, this isn't necessarily getting out to run in that sense, but knowing when to. It might be when to act decisively or move quickly in certain situations, and it could be. When do you need to take the swift action to avoid harm or to avoid missing out on an opportunity? Know when to run. Know when to take action, know when to do it and do it well and to do it with confidence. I think that's super important.

Speaker 1: 5:18

The next one was never count your money when you're sitting at the table and it's it's almost like you know you don't. Don't count your dollars until you've banked them. We need to stay focused in the present right. We need to understand what's going on around us, in our environment, in this case, what. What are the cards on the table? And you can't start counting all your positives, meaning you can't start claiming things if they aren't yours to take. And what I mean by this is let's not get distracted by potentials rather than let's focus on actuals. So I could say to you like, oh, this year I'm going to do $100,000 in revenue, but if it's day one and I've only done $100 today, it's going to be a tough journey if I'm not hitting the quota that I need. What we really need to understand is what is it going to take? Are we tracking towards it and are we getting the results? Because it's like people at the start of a year when you say I'm going to lose 10 kilos this year and you get into the gym and it starts to be hard work. You're already banking or you're already counting your money before you've even done the work. Do the work, then start to take those banks as they come.

Speaker 1: 6:27

Next one is an interesting one is every hand's a winner and every hand's a loser. And I think this is very important because we need to have that balanced perspective in life, where there are going to be ups, there are going to be downs, and with that we need to learn how to roll with the punches. How do we manage or embrace experiences, how do we see things as opportunities and how do we leverage situations, maybe for growth, or how do we avoid them creating bad situations? So, depending on the situation, in itself, your hand might be better than someone else's, but in someone else's perspective, your hand is worse than theirs. So just because you've been dealt a bad hand today doesn't mean it's the worst thing in the world. It just means that that's today right, one day does not define the rest of your life, but it's also.

Speaker 1: 7:16

It's also comes back to the whole thing that I like to refer to as the timeline in your journey. If you're here in the middle of your journey, you started here and the people you look up to are over here. Right, you can't compare, right, you're, you're ahead of this person. This person's thinking, wow, this guy is so crazy, but this guy is looking to this guy because he thinks he's so far ahead. So every hand's a winner and every hand's a loser. That's the reality of it. There's going to be ups and downs. There's going to be people ahead of you. There's going to be people behind you. Understand that, embrace that and just get on with the work.

Speaker 1: 7:47

The best you can hope for is to die in your sleep, that's. It doesn't seem very positive, but I think what the message here is what I've taken from it is we need to strive to make choices that can align with our values and our goals, so that you can look back in your life with no regrets, with satisfaction, and what I think it's really trying to say is like, if you die in your sleep, you're going to die peacefully, and that's what you want to do. You want to die peacefully, live without regrets. You don't want to be going through life thinking and looking over your shoulder wishing you had done this or done that. But go, do what you want, live by your values, live towards your goals, work towards your goals, and you'll have a good life. And then, when you do die in your sleep, you're going to die peacefully.

Speaker 1: 8:28

The next one is listening to others' wisdom. Now look this one I will be frank, I'll be open to this that here I am, guy on a podcast telling you all these different things in my own perspective. To be frank, a lot of this stuff that I'm talking about is just a message to myself, but I do want to encourage people to. Can you take something from this to help further your lifestyle? So you know, wisdom comes from our own perspective in the sense of like okay, is that valuable to us or is it just some guy trying to project onto me? So we need to be open to guidance 100% and, as a young man myself, we need to be willing to listen to people that have been through it, that have been around the block, that have achieved something or have done something which we want to attain to, and there's a level of value of learning from those that are more experienced. When we can learn from those, there's big value there. So be mindful of this, be open to it, but don't just listen to people blindly.

Speaker 1: 9:26

The next one is taking risks and understand how to take calculated risks. This one I've been doing big time, when you refer to it with the gambling world obviously, taking risk, big risk, big reward, but it's the same with life. But you need to know how to count the cards if you're gambling to be able to know that, is this going to pay off? Or you need to be very confident. But the same thing is applying to life. When we're taking risks, take calculated risks, figure out what are the things you need to be doing, how do we mitigate that risk, how do we lower that risk and how do we increase the chance of what we want actually occurring and that way we can say that yeah, okay, this is, there's an 80 chance that we're going to get this. Therefore, the risk, even though it's 20, of failure, it's not going to be that bad. However, if it meant that there's a high chance of this failing like 80 of this failing but the payout is huge, sometimes we get blinded by it and we choose the, the riskier option.

Speaker 1: 10:19

And the final point here is making peace with uncertainty. This one I struggle with. You know like I'm one to zoom out, to reflect and to also forecast, but there's a we have to accept the reality that there's a lot of things that we can not control. We can't control everything and there's a lot of things that will pop up out of the blue and we need to learn how to adapt and be flexible with it. It's the unpredictability of life. That's the simple fact of it. So we need to come prepared with a toolkit of flexibility. We need to come ready with resilience. We need to be willing to face this change because it's going to happen. Be at peace with it, be comfortable knowing that, okay, today is today. Bank your wins. Tomorrow's a new day. Let's see what happens. That's the short of it.

Speaker 1: 11:07

Yeah, so let me know if you've listened to this song, kenny Rogers the Gambler good old Kenny Rogers, and I really enjoy it. I've been listening to it with Carla and we just had a good little laugh about it because it's got kind of like a fun little strut to it. But I like looking at these different perspectives because maybe we don't realize that there's messages in places that we don't realize we need to look that can actually be a big help to our lives. So I would encourage you to maybe, when you are listening to music, have a think about is this actually something of a message that I can leverage for my life? How can I apply this to my life? And I'm not saying that every song is going to have that message, but it was just fun to be able to take this song I haven't really listened to it before. Look at it from my own perspective and how can we further our lifestyle? So let me know what you've learned from Old Mate Kenny and appreciate you being here.

Speaker 1: 11:50

If you did enjoy the podcast, hit, subscribe, leave a comment here on the YouTube. If you enjoyed listening to it with the audio, you can leave a review. You can reach out to me me as well. That would mean the absolute world to me. Yeah, that's it, folks. You have a wonderful day. Cheers.