How you play card games with your family is a decent preview of how you’ll do business.

Low stakes are where your defaults live. Nobody prepares for a Tuesday game of cards, so what comes out is unrehearsed: whether you bend a rule when convenient, how you handle losing to a younger brother, whether you need the win enough to spoil the evening. Those are the same instincts that turn up later with money and people who are counting on you.

Play one game this week deliberately, as if it mattered, and notice your own worst moment in it. That is the thing to work on, and it is much cheaper to fix over cards than over a job.