Travels, Ramblings, and some good'ole Poker

This is the assignment Jared has given me for the past two weeks.  His hint was to watch Shawshank Redemption.  I have not and i'll take a look tonight haha.

See, in my mind, I've grown up with the attitude that "you should compare yourself to the top, to the best" and that there are "no rooms for mistakes."  I owe a lot of my success to this past mindset.  We need pressure to improve and I tend to perform at my best when my coach or whomever is an asshole who pushes me past my limits and the only way I can do that on my own is to put as much pressure on myself as possible.

But, this thinking is wrong and it's unhealthy.  I think to be human is to accept that you really do make mistakes.  Not all mistakes are preventable with or without knowledge.  That's hard to deal with because I always envision that the elites, the ones who know better, never make easy mistakes.  In poker it would be something like 2barreling and giving up on a jt9 board against a station.  Unfortunately I think I have to accept that mistakes happen, even ones where you really should know better.  This is a lot of reiteration I know but it's a pretty big mental block for me and I'm not comfortable with it at all.  I believing in pursuing excellence and unobtainable (lol unobtainum) PERFECTION.  I set my goals high, far out of reach, so that if I fall short, my "failures" typically will have accomplished a lot anyway.

So to be human is to accept that we make mistakes, and that we can improve from them and move on.  If poker can be a metaphor for life, then it's taught me dwelling on the past too much is never a good idea.  It's all about moving forward, forward, and forward.  1 step back 2 steps forward.  Funny, last month actually replicated that.  I've started reviewing some stuff in holdem manager and wow, I was definitely too arrogant.  I feel like a student again peeking in, asking questions that may perhaps be too simple, but I'm soaking in more and I'm tweaking my game for the better.

To be human is to accept faults, strip away the excess, the unnecessary, and improve.

Maybe this means I should stop expecting perfection?  I'm excited to talk to Jared about this.  I'm assuming he's really a sports psychologist (I never actually looked at his credentials but he really is awesome) and he should know some stuff about coaches who push players past their limits in pursuit of perfection.  "NOT GOOD ENOUGH" is the mantra I live by.