But to many gamblers, a success such as a royal flush means something special. Play enough and you’ll get plenty of them. How many of you have pictures of your royal flushes on your cell phone waiting to show anyone polite enough to look? All they show are momentary good fortune. Play long enough and you’ll see a whole lot of both. You don’t know whether royal flushes (called “triumph” in the poem) or an extended losing streak (called “disaster”) will be next in line to visit you. Video poker likewise is full of variance. One more loss doesn’t mean they’re all that bad. This poem says that one additional victory does mean that they’re all that great. This phrase was a very small part of the book, but it speaks to me as a video poker player as surely as it does to tennis players.Įven the best tennis players lose some of the time. I read it recently in a book by Maria Konnikova which I will review next week. The phrase is etched over the players’ entrance at Wimbledon’s Centre Court. So next time you receive positive or negative news, treat those two imposters just the same.In the middle of his famous poem “If,” Rudyard Kipling poses the condition, “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.” At the end of the poem filled with twenty or so other conditions, comes the conclusion, “you’ll be a Man, my son.”Īlthough addressed to his son, this applies equally to daughters. The only actual power they hold is the power you give them. What I mean is that one man’s success is another man’s failure, and vice versa. It makes you realise the relativity of both success and failure. It means you simply acknowledge the event and continue on, come what may. If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat both equally. “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same”
But there’s one line I particularly enjoy, one that has helped me in the past through some very difficult times in business.
I loved how simple he made ‘being a better person’ sound, and I have tried to live by his words since I was first able to read them. The poem below was written by Rudyard Kipling and was a childhood favourite of mine. You treat those two imposters just the same.
Imagine being able to face both success and failure and neither alters the course that you have set yourself.
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