A lesson in patience from my wife

Long ago, when I was little, ladies played patience.  My mother used to play with a paired pack of miniature cards sold for just this purpose and I learnt from her.  The younger generation will recognise this as the ever-present Solitaire installed on every Windows computer.  We have all played it occasionally when sufficiently bored at work. 

However the way it crept under my skin was my wife’s habit of playing it on a small and rather aged Casio handheld computer.  It is left lying around in the place where folks need to linger and so gets played quite a lot.  Over the years it has taught me a thing or two that I thought worth sharing:-

• That just because a game starts well doesn’t mean that you will ‘win’
• Conversely, an unpromising start can work out very nicely
• Sometimes you have to remove a card you have got out in order to unlock the board.  In other words, not all progress is linear and sometimes one needs to retreat to go forwards
• If you can’t move anywhere you have lost
• Delaying putting a card down can be a smart non-move

What have you learnt about life from games? 

“Patience is a virtue,

Possess it if you can,

Seldom found in woman,

Never found in man!”

Tags: lessons from games, patience

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 10:25 and is filed under Business Change, Hints, Tips & Techniques, Personal Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.