Know Yourself Best
In order to accomplish everything that you set out to do in life (both in poker and away from the game), you must know yourself better than anything and anyone else in your world. I’ve learned this lesson many times and in many ways through the years, and it’s led me to learn that doing so allows you to custom-tailor your life into exactly what you want it to be (or at least help move you in that direction).
The opposite is true, too: failing to know yourself will only stunt your ability to improve and increase your standing in life. Poker, just like life, always has a way of finding your leaks and exploiting them until you plug them.
It’s funny how it all happens, too.
I can almost guarantee you’ve also experienced countless times where focusing on plugging these leaks has resulted in other, new leaks springing up. That’s life (and poker) though. Balance, structure, etc. are never really a perfect walk across a tightrope, but rather a series of adjustments as we move forward with the information we have at hand.
When playing poker, leaks in your game directly cost you money, and sometimes it can be painfully obvious. In life, sometimes it’s harder to find those leaks. Or easier to ignore, or both. There’s no doubt that knowing your strengths and weaknesses in poker is a valuable skill, but it is equally as valuable, if not more in life. Let’s explore why that is the case.
The Quest for More
Every single one of us is out for increase in our lives. It’s in our nature as human beings. Whether it’s an improvement in our relationships, skills (poker or otherwise), physical and/or mental health, money, personal possessions and property, or time (the most important of them all), every single one of us wants more of something, if not many of those things.
That increase can come in many forms. It can be an improvement in:
relationships (communication, intimacy, better social life etc.)
skills (at and away from the poker table)
physical health (eating better, strength and/or exercise, understanding how your body and energy levels work etc.)
mental health (understanding how your brain works)
What do you want?
Every single one of us has motivations, even those who seem the most “unmotivated.” Of course, the most basic driving forces of motivation are the ones that enable us to obtain food, water, shelter, etc.
You may or may not have heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs before. It is often depicted in the shape of a pyramid with those most basic necessities taking up the base of the pyramid. From there, you can see that each tier above it represents another aspect of our lives.
It’s funny to title this section, “what do you want?” and then talk about a hierarchy of needs. However, each aspect of life presents an opportunity for you to ask yourself what you truly want in each of those given areas.
Only when you are able to first identify what you want are you able to go after it.
How are you going to get it?
This site is 100% dedicated to helping you (continue to) increase your standing in all areas of life in order to become the best person, and as a result poker player to go along with it. We seek the very top of the pyramid, which conquers self-actualization, or the desire to become the most that one can be.
But that can only be done by incremental growth, building your foundation and continuing to build on top of it. Of course, this is a lifelong process, or journey. However you want to look at it.
Always Be Learning
The only constant is change. You know as a poker player that the game is always evolving, growing. If you aren’t staying up to date, other people are gaining ground on you, if not surpassing you and furthering that skill gap even more.
What’s the solution?
Always be learning. Whether in life or in poker, the key to accomplishing your goals (assuming you have goals – if not, let’s talk about that as well) is to keep growing and learning. Keep expanding your knowledge and skills in order to meet the demands of an ever-growing, ever-changing world.
In order to do this, you must have an open mind. Fedor Holz talks about this in his course at Pokercode: his first couple of years in the game led him to a place where he was almost a breakeven tournament player (after starting out as a losing player, of course).
What changed after that?
His mindset. He said he started looking at the game from a place of trying to see everything he didn’t know so that he could learn and understand those concepts and incorporate them into the game.
Ozan Varol is another person whose perspective on life I appreciate. He has gone all in on contrarian thinking in his life. According to him, a contrarian is somebody at their core who looks at conventional wisdom and asks why it is the way it is, and if there is a better way.
I subscribe to his email list, and one time he wrote something that was powerful enough that I wrote it down:
“You can’t learn what you think you already know.”
Tying It All Together
Knowing your strengths will enable you to maximize your return in many areas. Knowing your weaknesses will also shore up the back end of that. Of course, in your life, you will need to use your brain to determine the times when it is best for you to focus on increasing your talents and the times when you will need to hit the grind and plug your life leaks.
Either way, an open-minded approach to amassing knowledge that will increase your standing in life will always yield the best return on investment. And to do that, it is important you know yourself, both in terms of where you are and where you want to be. Thanks for reading this – I’ll leave you with one last quote to ponder until next time.
“Destination determines direction” – Jim Rohn
