Life Is a Game of Cards: Those Who Remember the Cards Already Played See Further

Life is a little like a game of cards. Some people play relying mostly on luck. Others look only at the cards in their own hand. And then there are those who pay close attention to the cards that have already been played.

More often than not, those are the players with an advantage.

Not because they know some secret trick, or because they are necessarily smarter than everyone else. They simply remember. They remember which cards have already appeared, which ones have been played, and which ones can no longer be in the opponents' hands. Little by little, they begin to form a picture of what the others might be holding.

The difference may seem small, but it isn't.

Someone who forgets every previous hand has to start from scratch every time. Someone who remembers what has already happened no longer looks only at the present. They look at the present in the light of everything that came before it.

That is how life works, too.

History is full of people who succeeded not necessarily because they had greater resources, but because they were better at understanding how those resources had already been used. In war, for instance, knowing an opponent's previous movements allows you to narrow down the range of moves they are likely to make next. Napoleon built much of his military strength on his ability to read the battlefield quickly, gather information, and adapt to what he saw.

During the Second World War, the battle for information became almost as important as the fighting itself. Intercepting communications, tracking movements and recognizing recurring patterns could make it possible to anticipate an enemy's next move before it became obvious.

The principle is always the same: you don't necessarily need to know which card your opponent is holding. Sometimes it is enough to know which cards have already been played.

The same thing happens in business.

An entrepreneur who looks only at today's market risks constantly being one step behind. An entrepreneur who remembers past failures, crises, consumer reactions, competitors' moves and mistakes made over the years has something far more valuable: strategic memory.

A product that failed teaches you something. A price that caused sales to collapse teaches you something. A failed advertising campaign teaches you something. A competitor abandoning a particular market leaves an important card on the table.

The biggest companies have turned this principle into a science. Amazon, Netflix and many others collect enormous amounts of information about past consumer behavior and use it to make predictions about what might happen next.

Every purchase, every search, every abandoned basket, every preference becomes, metaphorically speaking, another card that has left the deck.

The more cards you remember, the more readable the deck becomes.

But there is something even more important: remembering is not enough. You have to know how to connect what you remember.

A person can have an extraordinary memory and still understand nothing about the game. They may remember exactly what happened without understanding what it means.

True strategic ability begins when memory becomes interpretation.

We see this in human relationships, too. If someone has made the same promise three times and broken it three times, we can still choose to believe them a fourth time. But we can no longer behave as though we have no information.

The cards have already been played.

If a politician has repeatedly changed positions according to circumstances, that history is part of the game. If a company has always responded to a crisis in the same way, that behavior becomes a clue. If a person has repeatedly chosen the same path whenever faced with difficulties, it is reasonable to consider that possibility when trying to anticipate what they may do next.

That does not mean the future is already written.

It means that the past narrows the range of possibilities.

And perhaps that is the most interesting part of the metaphor.

We often think luck is everything. Some people seem to be born with the right cards, while others are dealt a terrible hand. To some extent, that is true. None of us gets to choose our entire deck. We do not choose the family we are born into, the historical period, the country, the opportunities that come our way or the unexpected events that will shape our lives.

But once the game begins, we can decide how to play.

We can forget the cards that have already been played and approach every day as if it were the first. Or we can observe, remember and learn.

We can ask ourselves why someone made a particular decision, why a company failed, why a government changed course, why a relationship ended, why a project did not work.

And, above all, we can try not to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Because true experience is not simply having lived through many things. It is remembering what we have lived through and using it to understand what is happening now.

In the end, remembering the cards that have already been played does not guarantee victory.

You can still lose.

But you enter the game with something almost as valuable as luck: a clearer understanding of the possibilities that remain.

Luck determines some of the cards we are dealt.

Memory, experience and the ability to observe determine how we choose to play them.

And perhaps that is one of the few things we can truly learn from the long game of life: we cannot always choose the cards we are dealt, but we can make sure we never forget the ones that have already been played.

I’ve Read Thousands of Books. Today I Saved Just One: Maybe My Father Was Right

Today I filled a suitcase and a duffel bag with books.

I had to clear them out of my daughter’s bookcase because the space needs to be freed up. As I picked them up one by one, I found myself looking at them, recognizing some, remembering when I bought them. Others surprised me because I had completely forgotten I even owned them.

And the books I moved today are only a fraction of what I’ve accumulated over the years. There are still boxes and boxes of them at my mother’s house. I don’t even know exactly how many. I only know there are a lot.

At some point, I stopped and thought about something.

How do so many people go through their entire lives having known, for the most part, only the books they had to read at school?

I’m not saying that as a criticism. I’m genuinely curious. For me, books have always been almost a natural part of life. I can hardly imagine my life without all those years of reading.

And yet, right after that thought came another one, much harder to sit with:

What have all these books really given me?

I’ve spent thousands of euros on books. I don’t even know how many hours I’ve spent reading them. Psychology, philosophy, history, economics, politics, human behavior, success, relationships, spirituality. I’ve looked for answers almost everywhere.

And then I look around at other people’s lives.

I see people who have probably read very little and yet have things I don’t have. Large houses, swimming pools, expensive cars, businesses, money. Not necessarily because they’re smarter or more capable. Their lives simply took a different direction.

And that leads to a question that isn’t easy to admit:

Maybe reading a lot doesn’t necessarily get you very far.

My father used to tell me that.

He said that by reading so many books, I was only making myself more mentally confused.

Back then, I didn’t like hearing it. I thought he didn’t understand what reading meant to me, that he saw only the time I spent with my nose in a book and not everything those books left inside me.

Today, as I pack books into a suitcase without even knowing where I’m going to put them next, his words come back to me differently.

Because maybe my father had noticed something I couldn’t see.

Every book adds something.

A theory. An explanation. A different way of looking at a situation. Then you read another and find someone arguing the exact opposite. Then another, and you discover that perhaps both are right, but only under certain circumstances.

At first, it feels like wealth.

After a while, it can become noise.

And the more you read, the harder it can become to tell the difference between what you actually think and everything you’ve absorbed from other people.

You can read a book about discipline and feel ready to change your life. Then you read one about motivation. Then habits. Then psychology. Then fear.

And after fifty books, you may be able to explain perfectly why you aren’t doing what you know you should be doing.

Yet you still don’t do it.

That is what interests me most today: reading can become a very sophisticated form of inaction.

While you’re reading, you feel as if you’re moving forward.

You’re learning.

You’re thinking.

You’re growing.

And sometimes you really are.

But sometimes you’re simply postponing the moment when you’ll have to put what you’ve learned to the test.

And that’s when I picked up one particular book today, one I decided to entrust to my daughter.

I told her, “Don’t sell this one.”

She can sell the others, give them away, get rid of them.

But not this one.

It’s The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman, in the 2003 Italian edition published by Sonzogno. I’ve always liked the cover: green, with four four-leaf clovers.

Why this book?

Because after everything I’ve read, I’ve come to believe that there is something many theories about success tend to overlook:

we don’t all start from the same place, and we don’t have the same degree of control over the outcome.

We like to tell ourselves that life is a kind of equation.

Study hard, and you’ll succeed.

Work hard, and you’ll succeed.

Be intelligent, and you’ll succeed.

Try hard enough, and eventually you’ll make it.

But life isn’t that simple.

There’s the family you’re born into. The place where you grow up. The historical moment. The people you meet. The opportunities that come your way. The ones you miss. Chance encounters. Coincidences.

And then there’s what we call luck.

That doesn’t mean everything is luck. That would be just as wrong.

It means that luck exists, and it plays a much bigger role in our lives than we like to admit.

That’s what makes Wiseman’s book so interesting to me. It doesn’t simply say that some people are lucky and others aren’t. It looks at what people who consider themselves lucky actually do, and whether certain behaviors make them more likely to encounter opportunities.

In the end, it feels very practical to me.

I can’t decide when luck will arrive.

But I can decide whether I leave the house.

I can decide how many people I meet.

I can decide whether to try something new.

I can decide whether, when an unexpected possibility appears, I immediately close the door or at least take a look at where it might lead.

Maybe we can’t control luck.

But we can put ourselves in places where luck has a chance to find us.

And that idea feels much more useful to me today than most theories about success.

Because it also forces us to be a little more honest with ourselves.

Not everything we have achieved is necessarily entirely due to our own merit.

And not everything we have failed to achieve is necessarily entirely our fault.

That’s a difficult thing to accept, especially in a society that keeps telling us that we can become anything we want if we want it badly enough.

I don’t think that’s true.

We can do a great deal.

We can prepare, study, work, improve, keep trying.

But we can’t control everything.

And perhaps that is one of the things it took me far too long to understand.

For years, I tried to understand life.

Why some people make it and others don’t.

Why some people find love and others remain alone.

Why some people become wealthy while others work their entire lives without ever building much wealth.

Why some people seem to stumble into opportunity after opportunity while others always seem to arrive at the wrong place at the wrong time.

I looked for answers in books.

Maybe my father understood that not every question has an answer in a book.

And maybe some answers simply don’t exist.

Or rather, they don’t exist in the form we would like them to.

Today, as I packed those books away, I didn’t think they had been useless.

That would be unfair.

Those books have been part of my life. They kept me company. They taught me things. They changed the way I thought. Some helped me through difficult moments. Others I have completely forgotten.

But today I realized something:

I don’t want to confuse what I know with what I have actually done.

They are two very different things.

I can know a great deal and still have done very little.

Someone else can know relatively little and build a great deal.

And perhaps life doesn’t keep score based on how many books we’ve read.

This realization doesn’t make me regret the books.

It simply makes me want to stop accumulating them.

Not necessarily stop reading, but stop believing that the next answer is always inside the next book.

Maybe now I need to step outside the pages for a while.

To try.

To fail.

To act.

To see what happens.

That’s why I told my daughter to keep The Luck Factor.

Not because I think that book contains the definitive explanation of life. No book does.

I want her to keep those four white four-leaf clovers as a small reminder.

You can prepare as much as you want. You can study. You can work hard. You can be intelligent, determined, capable.

And something can still happen that you never saw coming.

You can meet someone by chance.

An opportunity can appear.

A door can open.

You can simply find yourself in the right place at the right time.

Or you can find yourself in the wrong place.

And not all of that will necessarily be your fault or your achievement.

The important thing is not to turn that awareness into an excuse for doing nothing.

Quite the opposite.

If I can’t control luck, at least I want to be there when it comes along.

And as I closed that suitcase full of books, I realized that maybe this is where I’ve finally arrived.

I’ve spent a huge part of my life looking for ways to understand the world through books.

Today I find myself moving those books from one house to another and wondering what to do with them.

There are still so many at my mother’s house.

Maybe one day I’ll sell them. Maybe I’ll give them away. Maybe I’ll keep a few.

But I no longer think the fundamental question is, “How much did all that reading do for me?”

Maybe the real question is:

“Now that I’ve read all this, what am I willing to do with it?”

Because at some point, you have to close the book.

And start living what’s written outside it.

My father used to say that reading so much only made me more mentally confused.

Today, as I carried away a suitcase and a duffel bag full of books, for the first time I thought that maybe he was right.

Not because reading was useless.

But because perhaps I didn’t need to understand more. I needed to do more.

Sleep and Have Luck

My father often used to say a phrase that, when I was young, sounded almost like a provocation: “Sleep and have luck.”

As the years passed, however, my experiences, the books I have read, and above all the many human stories I have encountered led me to recognize that behind that simple saying there was a profound truth.

Hard work, education, talent, and perseverance are certainly important elements, but they do not always fully explain the destiny of individuals. Life contains a silent and unpredictable factor, one that is often ignored in the stories of success: luck.

We only need to observe many unexpected careers, many social rises that began in poor neighborhoods, and many transformations of ordinary people into successful entrepreneurs, influential figures, or public personalities. Behind some of these stories there are certainly ability and sacrifice, but there is often something else as well: a chance encounter with the right person at the right moment; an opportunity that appears unexpectedly; someone else’s mistake that opens a door; a favorable circumstance that completely changes the course of a life.

Yet society often tends to describe success as if it were always the exclusive result of individual merit. It is a comforting narrative because it suggests that those who reach the top did so only because they worked harder than everyone else. Reality, however, is usually far more complex. Two people with similar abilities can experience completely different destinies simply because fortune placed them in different circumstances.

Even the biblical tradition does not seem to deny this mysterious dimension of human existence. In Psalm 127, we read:

"Unless the Lord builds the house,

the builders labor in vain.

Unless the Lord watches over the city,

the guards stand watch in vain.

In vain you rise early

and stay up late,

toiling for food to eat—

for He grants sleep to those He loves."

The meaning of the Psalm is not an invitation to laziness. It does not say that human beings should abandon effort or responsibility. Rather, it expresses something deeper: human effort alone cannot explain everything. There is a dimension beyond our control, called by faith grace, by philosophy chance, and by everyday language simply luck.

Perhaps my father, with a simple phrase, had understood a truth that economists, sociologists, and psychologists have later examined: human beings create their own opportunities, but they do not completely control the circumstances in which those opportunities become reality.

Therefore, “sleep and have luck” is not a celebration of passivity. It is a lesson in humility. It reminds those who reach great heights not to attribute everything to themselves, and it reminds those who remain behind that failure is not always the result of personal inadequacy.

Because in life we certainly need our hands to build, but sometimes we also need something that does not depend on our hands.

Perhaps this is why the wisdom of an old popular saying still survives: we must work, prepare ourselves, and strive — but we must also recognize that every human journey contains an unpredictable element.

The builders need their tools.

But sometimes, they also need a favorable wind.