By: Esteban Hewitt
There’s a conversation Andres Kuusk has heard in various forms across decades of competing, advising, and coaching. It usually starts with a version of the same complaint. The circumstances aren’t fair. The starting position isn’t ideal. Someone else had advantages that weren’t available.
He understands the feeling. He doesn’t think it’s useful.
The central metaphor in Unlocking the Success Puzzle that tends to land hardest with readers is also one of the simplest. Every person begins life with a different hand of cards. Some hands are stronger. Some are genuinely difficult. That’s real, and Andres doesn’t pretend the playing field is level.
But the question that actually determines outcomes, he argues, isn’t whether the hand is fair. It’s whether a person is making the best decisions available from their current position.
What Strong Card Players Actually Do
In card games, skilled players don’t spend their energy wishing they’d been dealt something different. They focus entirely on extracting maximum value from the cards in front of them. They read the table. They manage their resources. They look for the moments when conditions have shifted enough in their favor to move forward aggressively rather than waiting for a perfect hand that may never arrive.
Life, Andres says, works similarly. The goal isn’t to wait for perfect circumstances. It’s to recognize when the odds have shifted enough to make action worthwhile.
That reframe does something specific and important. It redirects attention away from the things a person cannot control and toward the decisions they can make right now. It turns a fixed complaint into an active question. And active questions, unlike complaints, actually lead somewhere.
Strong poker players know something beginners often don’t. Every hand has situations in which it can succeed. The goal is not to wait for perfect cards. The goal is to recognize when the current situation makes your existing hand worth playing. Life works much the same way. Most people focus on the quality of the hand they were dealt. Strong decision-makers focus on recognizing the situations where that hand becomes valuable.
Reality Rewards Adaptation, Not Fairness
One of the more direct statements in Andres’s thinking is this: reality doesn’t guarantee fairness. It rewards adaptation. Many of the most successful people he has encountered over decades of competing internationally and working in business started with genuinely difficult hands.
What separated them from people with similar circumstances wasn’t luck alone. It was their ability to stop negotiating with reality and start working with it. That shift, from arguing about what should be true to engaging with what is true, is one of the most powerful moves available to anyone serious about improving their outcomes.
The hand matters. He’s clear about that. He’s equally clear that how you play it matters far more than most people allow themselves to believe.
The Assumption Hidden Inside Complaints
What Andres finds most interesting about the “why wasn’t I given better cards” question is the assumption embedded in it. The assumption that better cards would automatically produce better outcomes. That the problem is the starting position rather than the quality of play.
His career as a seven-time World Pentamind Champion, PhD economist, and C-suite executive offers a fairly direct counter-argument. None of those paths were guaranteed by circumstance. All of them required the kind of decision-making under uncertainty that his framework is designed to improve.
The cards, in other words, are only the beginning of the story. No one gets to choose their hand. But everyone gets to make decisions about how to play it, and over time, those decisions can matter enormously.
Stop asking why you weren’t dealt better cards. Start asking how to play the ones you have. Unlocking the Success Puzzle by Andres Kuusk is available now on Amazon.
