Ballers and Poker Players

There is something about convergence that I fear I left out in a previous blog. We all know that when properly executed the results that convergence can yield are phenomenal. However what do we do when one person falls short, when one person messes up, when one person asks too much? What do we do when minds and heads get knocked together and the ideas that come out are totally different and not at all pretty?

It isn’t easy to get two people to think the same way, or worse still an entire group of people to think the same way. Everyone has that special way of looking at the world that makes them different from the person standing next to them – it is called being a human being. I am afraid that I made convergence sound too simple, too easy, too basic a skill in my past blogs.

Working with other people requires certain finesse, a certain amount of class and a lot of maturity. Things are bound, nine times out of ten, to go a rye, to go so incredibly wrong that you do not even know where to begin to correct things - hello Murphy’s Law. The defining factor is not who got lucky and had everything go smoothly, the defining factor is, in fact, how you handle everything when anything goes wrong.

I cannot sit here and tell you that I am always a patient person, quite the contrary. I expect people to understand what I mean when I first say it, like what I write when they first read it, and never dislike anything I ever put together. However I am more then well aware that this is rarely the case, and despite the fact that I despise that bit of life, I live with it, and feel as though I deal with it as an adult should.

Convergence is a tricky thing, because it requires the mixing of at least two unlike things. I can promise you that I never will understand web design, that spelling will always plague me as one of the more nit-picky things in life and that when asked where exactly a comma should go I will never have a definite answer. I hate having things edited because red pen on my beautiful white paper is disruptive to me. I may internally have the most traumatizing and gut wrenching tantrum when someone does not like something I spent hours on, but the world will never see it.

Convergence is a lot like poker. The hand you’ve been dealt may very well be absolute shit, but you work with the cards you have, keep a straight face and a steady tone and you might just come out on top. But the minute you fall apart you’re forced to fold, and you never know how much you just might lose.

People drop balls all the time…if you haven’t dropped the ball than you’ve never played the game…the question is: Are your teammates (and your captain) capable of picking it back up? The best teammate does not point and laugh at the one who got butter fingers this time around, they just play the game they know…after all you never can be sure when you could be the owner of those slippery phalanges… chances are no one is trying to lose the game for anyone.