Still, there was an overflow of excellent quotes that are capable of changing the way we might be thinking about luck, chance, fate, mindset, and belief.
“My reason for getting into poker in the first place was to better understand that line between skill and luck, to learn what I could control and what I couldn’t… (4)
“That’s the thing about life: You can do what you do but in the end, some things remain stubbornly outside your control. … As they say, man plans, God laughs” (4).
“Its all about thinking well. The real question is, can good thinking and hard work get you there? And I think it can.” (Erik Seidel qtd. on 28).
“Poker does resemble language learning… there is a new grammar, a new vocabulary, a new way of relating to the world.” (29)
On betting on our beliefs: “Betting in poker isn’t incidental. It’s integral to the learning process. Your minds learn when we have a stake, a real stake in the outcome of our learning.” (40)
“That personal accountability, without the possibility of deflecting onto someone else, is key.” (41).
“Eric has been clear from the beginning: certain markers have to be met before I can move forward…if I am to work with him, I can’t skip steps.” (51).
On mentoring meetings with Erik: “There are no specific topics to cover or goals to hit. Instead, we walk.”
“‘It’s so easy to be delusional in this game,’ he tells me.” (61)
On the fallibility of the 10,000 hour rule: “Some people achieve much larger gains with much less investment than others who study far longer and work much harder.”
“Casinos are conceived in a way that depletes your decision-making abilities and emotional reserves.” (119). This make me think of applications on my phone as well.
“Fresh air, sky, water, trees: these are the elements of clear-headedness. Our minds resent in the presence of greenery .We feel more relaxed after nature walks. We’re less angry, more alive, more thoughtful” (119)
“True skill is knowing your own limits — and the power of variance in the immediate future. Because who knows who long “immediate future” might last?” (125)
“Our thinking about luck has real consequences in terms of our emotional well-being, our decisions and the way we implicitly view the world and our role in it.” (133)
No complaining. No bad beats. The “frame shift” of seeing yourself as an almost-victor playing your best game, plants “seeds of resilience of being able to overcome the bad beats that you can’t avoid and mentally position yourself to be prepared for next time…. that attitude is what I think of as a luck amplifier. Sure, you can’t actually change the cards, and the variance will be what it will be — but you will feel a whole lot happier and better adjusted while you take life’s blows, and your ready mindset will prepare you for the change in variance that will come at some point.” (134)
I just follow that simple piece of advice: no bad beats. Forget they every happened.” (136).
“If a man look sharply, and attentively, he shall see Fortune: for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.” -Francis Bacon, “Of Fortune,” 1625 (qtd. in Konnikova 137).
“In everything, stability and support are important components in success.” (139).
“Lack of presence has brought down many a player…Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action.” (147)
“Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.” (Louis Pasteur)…. if you’re not observing well, observing closely to begin with, no amount of preparation is enough.” (147)
“You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do.” (148)
“If we want to be successful, “we need to train our powers of observation, to cultivate that attitude of mind of being constantly on the look-out for the unexpected and make a habit of examining every clue that chance presents.” (William Beveridge in the The Art of Scientific Investigation, qtd. on 148)
“Everybody has a great opportunity to succeed and prosper at whatever they do, and everyone has some kind of unique gift. And I see that oftentimes, the most difficulty we cause ourselves is kind of fighting against the grain of what is healthy for us.” Andrew Lichtenberger, aka Chewy, qtd. on 152)
“How good are you at figuring out how others see the world — and at gearing your own actions accordingly? Remember: objective reality doesn’t actually matter. Subjective perception, and your ability to tune into it accurately, is key to the win.” (184)
“The better you get, the worse you are — because the flaws that you wouldn’t even think of looking at before are now visible and need to be addressed. If you want to grow, if you want to progress, you need to always dig deeper” (192).
“It’s fine to be proud of milestones… but it’s also important to stay focused on the bigger picture, and remain aware of how much you have yet to accomplish. It’s important to not let a minor victory lull you into thinking you’re doing great, when all you’re doing is better than before but not good enough to actually make it count.” (192)
“When we make thin-slice judgments of people…our inputs are often mistaken. (199)
“People aren’t a combination of traits. They are a mosaic of reactions to and interactions with situations” (219)
“His point is a simple one: your edge is your edge only if you’re playing your best game. To play your best game, you need to be your best you. Rested, sharp, focused.” (244)
“He wants me to focus on what I can control, not the irrelevant noise.” (247)
“Jared [the mental game coach] gets right to the point. ‘To go straight for the jugular: it all comes down to confidence, self-esteem, identity, what some people call ego,’ he tells me. Who are you? What’s important to you? ‘ When you sit down to play, you put yourself on the line. What you have to understand is you’re always a person first and a poker player second.’ The key to figuring out where you emotional leaks will be as a player is to identify where they are as a human and what it is that brought you to the table to begin with. ‘How to you feel about yourself? Do you want to prove you’re not an idiot, or overcome pain, or fulfil visions and dreams of yourself as someone capable of playing at the highest levels?’” (251)
“‘The only thing you can truly expect is your worst,’ Jared tells me. ‘Everything else is earned every single day.’” (257)
“It’s a process known as embodied cognition: embody the feeling you want to express, and your outer mind and body will often fall into alignment. Channel your outer warrior and your inner one may not be long in coming out.” (263)
“…the endless selection of pharmaceuticals is evidence of something bigger: these pros approach nearly everything as a game-theoretical model to be optimized.”(269)
“Quality ratios. Weighing benefits versus costs, calculating the best use of time, evaluating quality of life with different factors tweaked: welcome to the mind of a true poker player when it comes to most any decision.” (270)
“I’ve set off on a journey to learn about the limits of chance, and I’ve proven something that I need to prove to myself: that with the right mindset, the right tools, you can conquer, excel, emerge triumphant — even through the setbacks, even when the original road map proves faulty and needs to be replaced.” (286)
“Erik is the consummate jazz musician. Constantly evolving, constantly improvising, constantly responding. You can teach classical music technique. you can’t teach someone the spirit of jazz.” (290)
“I may not believe in superstition. But I am coming to appreciate the power of belief in a broader sense. As it happens, there may indeed be something to the hot hand: thinking you’re on a streak may not be a fallacy after all, at least not always…. how you feel affects how you act … streaks that require actual human performance may indeed exist. The more the realm is subject to individual action, such as creative careers where mindset is one of the central elements, the more this is the case.” (312)
“During a break, I walk outside — fresh air, always, whenever possible.” (314)
“I’m willing to leave my ego at the door and revisit my thought process, over and over.” (317)
“There are, too, the moments of simple beauty. I’ve now learned to pause, wherever I am. To appreciate the contrast between the table and the rest of it, to absorb and not just dread the travel.” (317)
“Life happens, and through it all, we play. We play, gaining perspective, survival skills, the strength and knowledge to be the conqueror rather than the conquered. We play, and we acknowledge, with the full force of the outside world, just how lucky we are to be sitting at the table, to have the chance to even play the game. … We have won the impossible, improbable lottery of birth.” (322)
“In 1979, Carl Sagan wrote about the awe of the universe in his notebooks…. ‘The future belongs to those able to learn, to change, to accommodate to this exquisite Cosmos that we have been privileged to inhabit for a brief moment.’” (325)
“[Erik] reflects a bit more. “I hope I can keep playing for a very, very long time,’ he says finally. ‘I don’t want to have to retire. This game is just too damn interesting. It’s such a beautiful game.’” (326)
