Is it the hand you're dealt, or how you choose to play it?

Does it ever feel if it weren't for bad luck, you'd have no luck at all? That's a common phrase around our household where murphy's law, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, is upheld on a routine basis in quite spectacular ways. It'd be easy for us to give up. We could try to live a simpler life hoping the less we strive for, the fewer opportunities there would be for things to go wrong in our lives, yet there'd also be fewer opportunities to go right. As both of us have now entered the final months before hitting the big three-oh, we've had more than our fair share of encounters with murphy and his law. However, we can either focus on what went wrong or choose to be grateful for what went right.

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. - Thomas Jefferson

The perspective we choose to view our past from can have a critical impact on how we decide to move forward. If you truly believe everything you do is doomed to failure, you're less likely to try your hand at new rewarding endeavours. Yes, failure is harder to accept than success; it's also harder achieving success than reaching failure, so it takes a lot more hard work.

The number of times we've tried and failed far exceeds the number of times our outcome has been a success, yet if we gave up when the odds stacked against us, we'd never succeed.

Over the past decade, we've gone from sleeping in a car and minimum wage jobs to having our humble piece of property with an opportunity to employ others at fair wages thanks to the hand life dealt us and, more importantly, our hard work.