As 2016 becomes 2017, we reach the time of year when everyone starts manically trying to plan the next 12 months of their future in the space of a few days. While many poker players are ahead of the curve in understanding where they want to go in life, it’s easy to go through a whole year without thinking much about what you’ll be doing the year after.

In the case of many recreational poker players, evaluating one’s goals for the year ahead requires making decisions about exactly what kind of role poker will play in their lives. Those with families and careers outside of poker to worry about will sometimes find it difficult to balance their goals and commitments, so it’s time for a bit of introspection if you’re in that group of people.

What do you actually want?

The most fundamental question to answer with regard to your future is to first figure out exactly what it is you want out of life. This requires a degree of self-awareness that can be hard to achieve – many people aren’t really aware of what their most important motivations in life are.

Do you prioritize a career that will allow you to make a lot of money, to provide for your family’s future? Are you a younger person looking to decide on a career path, trying to figure out if poker is right for you? Are you an established pro, happy with your current position but tempted by a life outside of poker?

We all have different circumstances and life experiences, and we all have different priorities. You may find that when you really look at what you want out of life, poker doesn’t fit that mould at all – or you may find it fits you even better than what you’re currently doing. But until you look inward, you won’t know for sure.

Balancing short-term and long-term perspectives

We live in an age of instant gratification, and sometimes it can be easy to let a lack of patience get the better of us. There will be times – particularly when you go through a phase of rapid learning or positive results – where you have a strong motivation to play poker as often as possible. This is unavoidable, and it happens even with the most motivated of players.

The trick is to harness these occasions to enable efficient short-term planning, while making a note of how often they come along. If we know how frequent these periods are, we can start to figure out whether it’s realistic that we’ll be able to maintain motivation in future. If you’re the kind of person who only really gets motivated to play poker after you’ve just won a big tournament, that’s not going to be a sustainable mentality.

Rather than seeking to change your own fundamental motivations – many of us might be so attracted to the independent lifestyle of a poker player that we might convince ourselves we enjoy playing more than we actually do – it’s important to be realistic and plan for both the fluctuations in your short-term motivation, and the things that keep you interested in the long term. The reality is that professional poker isn’t for everyone.

Surveying the poker landscape

Before you make any decisions at all about your future, it makes sense to ensure those decisions are informed ones. You can’t make an informed decision about your future in poker until you make some judgment calls about the current landscape you’re looking at, and the way you expect both your own game and the game itself to change in future.

For example, if you’re a cash game player, you’ll probably want to think long and hard about where to direct your energy in 2017 and beyond – winrates in online cash games are becoming extremely thin, and it’s difficult to put in enough live volume in a year to guarantee a decent income unless you live in a big poker city like Vegas or London.

If you’re already struggling to make the leap to becoming a winning player in the games you play, you’ll want to make an estimate of how much time it might take you to get there, and whether your enjoyment of the game and future aspirations will be high enough to offset the low or negative hourly rate you’ll be making as you strive to get there.

Making and executing a plan

The final step, of course, is to act on the decisions you’ve made regarding your poker future. But action without direction is futile, and thus it is crucial to spend some time in the planning stage. This means not only knowing your general direction and approach, but knowing the steps that will guide you along the way.

Setting your goals and expectations, as well as predicting the most likely challenges and pitfalls you might face, will set you up for success. Even if your goal is not to play much poker because you want to focus on family obligations, a plan is necessary for you to determine what the definition of “not much” might actually be.

The bottom line is that it can be difficult or even problematic to try to plan out your poker future too far in advance, since the game changes so fast. But if you want to give yourself the best possible chance of securing the poker future that you want for yourself – whatever that may be – then the preparation process starts today.

With that in mind, it’s time to ask yourself that first tough question – what do I actually want?