This is the kind of stuff I think about while mowing my lawn, which is why there’s usually a few missed spots around the swing set in the backyard. My thoughts on one overcast Sunday afternoon will turn into a 3-part series of articles. This week’s installment will have very little to do with poker directly, but it’s about life, and since poker is a big part of most of our lives here at P5s…hopefully, everyone will read between the lines, bear with me for 1000 words or so and figure out where I’ll get to at the end. If you’re only interested in poker stuff, quit reading now and check back in next week, or go read Fox’s articles. He’s much better at that stuff than I am anyway. <READMORE>

As adults, we all have components of our lives that are very near-term, which I’ll call “what you do”, and very long-term, which is “who you are”. There is also an in-between, which I guess we could say is “what your occupation is”, which in my experience tends to be fleeting and dangerous to focus on. More on that topic in a bit. “What you do” are the most immediate decisions or tasks in your life, and are usually not more than a few hours into the future. If you’re a college student, a salesman, a housewife or an engineer, “what you do” might be:

Student – go to chemistry class, study for mid-term, complete a lab, go to a kegger, get loaded and throw up in the bushes outside your dorm
Salesman – make 10 cold calls, complete the Johnson’s Hardware pitch, take a client to dinner, get loaded and throw up in the bushes in front of your apartment
Housewife – make breakfast, vacuum carpets, get kids to school, throw a margarita party while kids are at school, get loaded and throw up in the garden in the backyard
Engineer – perform spectral analysis, complete a requirements matrix, go to Happy Hour with other dorks, get loaded and throw up in the back seat of your co-worker’s car

“Who you are” is the synopses of what you’d like to accomplish during your lifetime…examples are:

Student – find something you’d like to do for the rest of your life, find someone you’d like to do it with, quit drinking so damn much
Salesman – move into a non-commissioned management position, stop having to hear the word “no” 20 times a day, quit drinking so damn much
Housewife – raise your children to be smarter, politer and have a better future than you do, be active in charities and volunteer work, quit drinking so damn much
Engineer – invent something marketable and/or interesting, hold several patents, retire at 57, get a girl to talk to you, quit drinking so damn much

As I said before, the “what your occupation is” really doesn’t come into play in either of those lists. Unlike the very short-term and very long-term, “what your occupation is” can be completely unpredictable and at the whims of other people and fleeting fortunes. Most people, especially college-educated adults, will go through many career transitions throughout the course of their lives, the majority of which will not be of their own doing. In my case, I worked in the telecommunications industry for my first twelve years out of college. For the last five of those, I worked at a company where I spent nights, weekends, customer visits away from my wife and child, dedicating myself to designing and helping sell the best product we could come up with. At that, we succeeded…it was a great box that did everything we said it did. However, the marketplace changed and customers no longer had any money to spend when telecom crashed in 2001-2002. My fabulous director was replaced by one that was mediocre, then the mediocre director was replaced by one who was only interested in his own employment, and I was laid off. I spent the day in Baltimore with a customer on April 16, 2003. On April 17th, I came in to the office to find out I had two hours to pack my shit and get out and that my severance package would be in the mail within a month.

I had nothing but great performance reviews and promotions: the “what you do” part of my life had been a success. My life was shook up, but the “who you are” long-term vision I had for myself was unaffected. I still knew what kind of father, husband, provider and person I wanted to be. Only the “what your occupation is” part was jumbled for a long time, and still isn’t as comfortable today as it was prior to April 17, 2003.

OK, enough. Even I’m bored, and it was my lawn that started this mess. Let’s talk about poker.

Poker is also a journey of “what you do” and “who you are”. “What you do” is the hand-by-hand analysis and strategy that we all love to discuss endlessly, the topic of most poker books, message board posts, magazine articles, etc. “Who you are” is the vision of poker as a lifelong process, where bankroll management, mental growth and personal reflection are the vehicles that take us down the road. The space in-between is a minefield of donkeys, overlooked opportunities, bad beats, chopped pots and misreads that cost us tournaments, SNGs and winning cash game sessions. We have little control of the middle ground, and therefore, we obsess over it. Every week, there will be dozens of posts on P5s where we commiserate about how bad we’re running, how many consecutive tournaments we’ve gone without a cash, and how many set-over-set losses and 3-out rivers we’ve suffered. If we can shift the focus away from that purgatory, to “what you do” and “who you are”, only then can we truly be successful. Next time, we’ll start to look at how to do just that.
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