The Worst Thing That Can Happen Is You’ll Lose

I sat staring with dread at the cards that lay in front of me. It was a sunny fall afternoon, and I was at Bally’s Wild Wild West Casino in Atlantic City. At a blackjack table. And in front of me was a 16, and the dealer was showing a 7. I was terrified. I barely knew the game at that point, loosely familiar with basic strategy, but I was very familiar with the concept of busting, and equally familiar with the fact that the next card was likely to be a 10. My hands were cold and shaking.

I looked up at the dealer - tall, large-framed, imposing black man - who held in his hands the future of my $15 bet. I was defeated, and I was silently begging him for mercy. It came.

He opened his eyes really wide, scoffed, and said the words that permanently changed my relationship to him, and to the game: “What? I ain’t never seen no 16 beat a 17.” So I hit, got a 5, made 21, and won the hand. And many more thereafter. I made $400 at that table, my first “big win” ever, and I was elated. The dealer was no longer my enemy; in that moment he became my best friend. And there, on a sunny fall afternoon in Atlantic City, I learned a valuable profitable lesson: the worst thing that can happen is you’ll lose.

What was I afraid of? It was, after all, just $15, and at the moment that I lost - had I lost - the next hand would begin and I’d have another shot at winning. I really got it that day. All I could ever do was play the game, and it was up to me whether I played it as designed or messed with the strategy and catered to my fears. And if I played it as designed, I would either win or lose, but the likelihood of losing was much greater if I let fear take control. It took one more incident, where I didn’t hit a 16 out of fear and saw a 5 go to the next player, to really cement that for me. Since then I’ve never made that mistake.

That dealer at Bally’s impacted my life in a way that he’ll probably never know. He made me start taking fear out of the equation everywhere in my life. Because of that one hand, I was (almost) never again afraid to make the right move. His words are forever fused to my thinking. Thanks to him, I stopped dreading what might happen and started just dealing with the end result, whatever that result was.

How many times do we as humans make the decision that we know in our hearts is the wrong one, just because we’re afraid to take the risk of making the right one? How many times do we fold a poker hand even though we know it’s a winner? How many times do we not take a job - or even apply to one - because we’re afraid that we won’t be good enough for it? How many times do we choose to sit and talk to our friends (or ourselves) instead of going up and talking to that attractive stranger, because we’re afraid that they’ll reject us? How many relationships end because we’re afraid they won’t turn out? How many more never start? Too many.

The worst that can happen if you make the right move is you’ll lose. And if you make the wrong move, you’ll probably lose anyway.