Creativity Quote by Jordi Segués

The line borrows poker’s glamour to smuggle in a hard-edged self-help thesis: your life may deal you randomness, but you’re still responsible for the hand. For an entrepreneur, it’s an on-brand metaphor. Poker isn’t about purity or destiny; it’s about odds, nerves, and the willingness to make a move without complete information. That’s startup culture in one sentence: imperfect data, high stakes, performative confidence, and the constant temptation to confuse risk with virtue.

The phrasing is telling. “Life is like a poker game” nods to chance, but the second clause snaps the focus back to agency: “you choose how the cards are played”. Not which cards you get - that would be too honest - but how you deploy them. The subtext is a worldview that prizes strategy over complaint, adaptation over fairness. It quietly reframes structural problems (bad “deals” like inequality, health, geography) as challenges of execution. That can be motivating, and also morally convenient.

Poker also implies bluffing: narrative control as a business skill. You don’t just make decisions; you sell them, sometimes before the results exist. The quote flatters the listener into seeing themselves as a player rather than a victim, which is exactly the emotional pitch entrepreneurs often make to teams, investors, and themselves: variance is real, but responsibility is non-negotiable.

Its intent, then, isn’t philosophical subtlety. It’s a compact cultural permission slip to treat uncertainty as a venue for choice - and to treat choice as identity.