I was flying home from Milwaukee with my wife, Claire, and we were playing Scrabble on the iPad (very fun by the way). As I struggled to keep up with her words and complained about the letters I had in my tile rack, it struck me, life is like a game of scrabble.
You see, we all get different tiles. Sometimes all vowels, sometimes all consonants, sometimes the awkward Z or Q that you can’t find a place for, sometimes there seems to be no place on the board to squeeze in a word. Sometimes you draw a F when you need an A and rarely do all of the pieces line up for a perfect score.
The difference in successful people, in Scrabble and in life, is not what tiles they get, but how they play them. It is true that some hands are easier than others, but every hand has opportunities, it’s just a matter of looking hard enough, being patient enough, and being prepared to take advantage of those opportunities.
It’s been said before in other ways, but the illustration is no less true. The moral of this story is simple: let’s all stop complaining about the tiles we have and start looking for opportunities to score more points.