Some people read those in-flight magazines in the seat pocket in front of you, next to the vomit bag. I do, actually. For every insipid “someone paid me to write about an exotic trip somewhere you’ll never take” article or list of celebrities’ favorite hotels, there are usually a few nuggets of wisdom waiting to be mined.

In this month’s Sky magazine from Delta Airlines, there is a transcript of a dialogue between self-help yogi Deepak Chopra and Def Jam founder Russell Simmons. Two men seemingly unrelated, but at this point in their careers, both focused on the same goals: to help individuals and communities strive for better things. If they happen to make a few million as a result…well, so much the better.

Near the end of the article, Chopra talks about the most important attributes of a Buddhist philosophy as “in the moment” emotions: joy, compassion, kindness. He concludes his thought by saying:

“Success is the most overrated value. The motto should be: pursue excellence and ignore success.”

This bounced around my brain for the duration of the flight, my entire trip, and the return flight home. Ignore success? The drive to be successful is at the heart of our Western, capitalistic society. We want as much as we can get out of whatever we’re doing…otherwise, what’s the point? Most of us strive for this goal within a structure of morality, but in the end, we’re told from a very early age to try to be the best.

Success, however, can be denied by factors beyond our control. Sometimes we truly do everything as well as it can be done, and are not rewarded by the result. Anyone who plays a game with an element of random chance understands this. Or should.

For most walks of life, defining “excellence” while taking the success aspect out is very difficult. In poker, it’s usually fairly easy. If we make the best choice at every decision point, in every hand we play…that’s excellence. If I trapped my opponent, but he sucked on the river, so be it. If my A-K lost a necessary coin flip to J-J late in a tournament, so be it. If I had the right fold equity against someone’s range to 4-bet with air, but ran into aces, so be it.

A recent PocketFives thread indirectly asked the question “How many tournaments do I have to play to know I’m a winning player?” Many of the answers stated with huge online fields, the number is far too large to ever reach. The statistical model will never converge, absorbing all of the variance and determining true ROI. The enormous return from getting very lucky and winning one tournament will skew the results for a very large set of samples to follow.

I found this response interesting – technically accurate, and yet incredibly at odds with our culture of celebrating tournament winners. Nearly every month, a new online stud player emerges from the crowd, goes on an incredible heater, and hauls in a series of big scores in short order. Each time, a thread or two is created congratulating said stud, filled with post after post of:

“He’s a sicko”
“Rapin’ hard”
“Absolute beast”
“Great player – the new phenom”

If we’re to believe, however, that there is no way to truly judge if someone is a winning, successful player without hundreds of thousands of tournaments played so the ROI fluctuations stabilize…why do we celebrate someone being good just because they won a couple tournaments? Isn’t that precisely the success-based, results-oriented thinking we are attempting to avoid?

To be fair, most of the time, others who post celebratory platitudes about each month’s Next Big Thing are educated about the game, and fit to judge whether or not someone is difficult to play against (one of the great indicators someone is excellent at poker, not just successful). But not always.

From time to time, the community is divided on what Nigel Tufnel called “the fine line between stupid and clever.”

Anyone who has been around PocketFives for any length of time can remember players with controversially high-variance styles. They may pick bad spots to make bluffs, seemingly without fold equity or against tight opponents showing extreme strength. They may call incredibly light. They may do things mathematically infeasible based on known tournament theory.

The discussion boards are always divided about whether or not these players are doing the right thing. Even if you end up making some money because you ran hot…should you play like these “lightning rods”? Should you develop unsound strategies with the thought that if you get lucky, it’ll work great? Is that the excellence you should strive for? Assuredly not. But if we allow ourselves to be distracted by success, either someone else’s or our own, staying on the right course for improvement can be tough.

Focus on the right thing: what we did, not how it turned out. Question your play in pots you won as often as you do pots you didn’t. Separate the result from the quality of the decision.

Success is a by-product of excellence, not the means to its own end. Ignore success. Pursue excellence.