Make or Break

Lately I've been feeling a little bit of a slowdown towards poker. The initial "this is an exciting new thing" has worn off, I'm finding it harder to study and play each day and just finding it hard to be really motivated towards poker in general. I've been looking at how I can develop some more sustainable motivation and goal setting techinques and stumbled on some pretty interesting articles by Steve Pavlina:

Why Some Goals Make You Run In Circles
How To Achieve Stretch Goals

Now I admit Steve is pretty out there, even in terms of the personal development community. I used to read a lot of his stuff when I was younger but became a little turned off after he started pushing his ideas to a pretty far limit - such as the idea of subjective consciousness where you're the only conscious being in reality and other beings are just manifestations of your consciousness. In any case I haven't read his stuff for years, but was drawn in by these blog titles relating to my situation (must have manifested them!) and they were extremely useful to me.

So, firstly there's the standard goal achievement model of:

• Define your outcome
• Make a plan to get there
• Take lots of action
• Refine your approach as needed
• Persist until you succeed

And this works, a lot of the time - but I'm sure there's been time's that you've done this over and over towards a specific outcome and it hasn't worked no matter how hard you've tried (maybe poker?), you're just treading water and making very slow if any progress. Steve says this model works well if you don't need much inner change, or another way of saying this is that you have the right vibe.

The example he uses is say two different people want to clean up their office. The first person is a neat person, likes having things organized and in their proper place. This goal setting model is going to work very well for them, they'll decide what they want to do, write down a to-do list and go out their and do it pretty effortlessly. Now person two isn't happy with the work he does in his office, he thinks there's so much clutter that it's a monumental task, easily gets distracted by things in his office and has other beliefs, thoughts and feeling (an overall vibe) that doesn't mesh with cleaning up the office. No matter how well he executes the goal setting technique the task is going to be very hard, will take him a long time and he'll probably beat himself up over it - not very sustainable. It's like trying to push two opposing magnets together, it's possible, but it's a lot of effort and you'll probably get tired of it. If you flip one of the magnets (your vibe) before trying to push them together then it's effortless. So,

This blog is already long enough so I won't go into how to change your vibe (Check out the above links, Steve does a much better job) but reading this I realised how terrible my vibe is. In the last year I've been lazy and complacent, bouncing around in games and I'm carrying that vibe into this - hoping that with hard, smart work it can change (thinking the journey will change me rather than actively trying to change myself). I'm approaching this as a 50NL player, where as instead I've should be approaching this like a 1kNL player. And I've played that high before regularly, even 5kNL - so I know how to think like that, what beliefs and feelings I had, I just have to zone back in on them. Back when I was playing HSNL I would do everything perfectly - run every morning, eat well, prepare for every session, because if I didn't I'd get smashed, I needed to be ontop of my game. Lately though I've been falling into the mindset of "It's just 50NL" and giving myself passes on all those things. So, death to the 50NL mindset as I'm not a 50NL player, I'm a 1kNL+ player. I also have to surround myself with successful poker players, ideally playing higher than me or having the vibe I want. In the beginning I think this will have to be mostly be through coaching, but hopefully as I get more well known in the community/can show I have more to offer I'll be able to make them as normal poker friends (although if anyone wants to talk PM me your skype!). I also need to role model off people - CTS's LiveJournal Blog from 4 years ago which chronicles his progress from 2/4 to highstakes is amazing, and I'm sure I'll be reading/watching a lot of things by Sauce123 who got to nosebleeds, cashed out, then went from micros to nosebleeds again at lightning speed.

So as you can probably tell, I'm pretty motivated :). And I've realised that trying to change myself by achieving a goal is the wrong way of looking at it (and a ton of work), instead I have to change myself to achieve a goal. For now I'm switching from the goal setting model "6 hours per day play, 3 videos, etc" to focusing on creating a good vibe. Lining up all my little magnets so instead of orbiting my goal I'm attracted towards it, inevitably smacking into it with relative ease.