Success Quote by Van Morrison

Van Morrison’s line reads like advice smuggled inside a barroom parable: winning isn’t about swagger, it’s about tolerance for exposure. “Prepared to lose sometime” rejects the fantasy of perpetual control that fuels both competitive culture and the mythology of genius. In Morrison’s world, the artist and the gambler are the same figure - moving by feel, staking reputation, accepting that a public misstep is part of the price of doing anything worth doing.

The second sentence sharpens the knife. “Leave one or two cards showing” is strategy, but it’s also an ethic. Don’t play so tight you become unreadable; don’t curate yourself into a sealed product. It’s a quietly radical stance for a performer: the audience doesn’t connect to perfection, it connects to the glimpse of the mechanism - the tells, the bruises, the human grain. Morrison, famously private and prickly, knows the paradox of the stage: you can guard your life, but you still have to reveal enough to make the song ring true.

There’s also a cultural jab here at the machismo of “never let them see you sweat.” Morrison argues that opacity is not strength; it’s fear. The “cards showing” are vulnerability as leverage, risk as proof of seriousness. If you want the payoff - in music, love, or any high-stakes pursuit - you have to accept the possibility of losing and the necessity of being seen.