Simple as that.Ī version of this originally appeared on can be pretty instructive. Winning in business and in life is exactly the same: consistently make good decisions. The most important thing to remember is this: To win at poker, make the right bets on the right cards over and over. Keep your feet planted firmly on the ground. No matter how successful you are, never forget the odds. You can sometimes bluff others, but never bluff yourself. That’s when your ego writes checks that the laws of probability can’t cash. When you start to think the deck is stacked in your favor – that you’re lucky, that you can’t lose – that’s when you make risky bets you shouldn’t make. Short-term success can be a dangerous thing. If not, you’ve got to find another line of work. If you’re known for playing clean, for being a good sport, for showing up and meeting your commitments, you get asked to play again and again. Get caught cheating at poker, word gets around and you’re done. You have to win if you want to be successful, and the only way to do that is to be consistently better than the competition. Competitive markets are essentially zero-sum games. But every sale, every transaction, every opportunity has one winner and a bunch of losers. It’s a zero-sum game.Įvery poker match has winners and losers, but the game always nets out to zero because you’re playing against others. And over time, you develop your own unique way of playing the game. You gain confidence from winning and wisdom from losing. There simply is no substitute for the lessons you learn the hard way. That’s how you develop your own skills, strategies and tactics.
That’s how you figure out what works and what doesn’t. The only way to outperform the competition is from real-world experience. In poker as in business, there are rules, strategies, nuances and lessons to learn. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and that’s how you have to play it if you want to win. It’s a game of attrition and you have to persevere. If you try to win big with a few quick high-risk bets, there’s a very good chance you’ll lose your shirt and everything else. You have to be in the game consistently for a long, long time to win. You can’t win if you don’t play.Īnd by “play,” I don’t mean a game or two here or there. The rules of the game may be straightforward, but winning is by no means a slam-dunk. It’s the same in business and in life: Make the right moves over and over and you’ll ultimately win. Chance still plays a role, but players who consistently make the right bets on the right cards will still win over the long haul. There is simply no way to change that.īut when a game includes strategy and you’re competing against others – as in poker – that’s an entirely different story. In a pure game of chance, past results have no effect on future outcomes. If you flip a coin 20 times and it comes up ‘heads’ each time, the odds of getting another ‘heads’ on the 21st flip is still 50-50.
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