The Balance Within Everything
Hey guys,
This next post is kind of a follow up from my previous post and a result sort of a new ahhh moment. When I began playing poker, I started off as what you would consider a "feel" player, as many of us have. Even back then, I always knew from the beginning that an optimal strategy had to exist and it was a skill game. The last few years of my poker career, I have been very focused on learning GTO and approaching the game more mathematically. With that I feel like GTO is involved in all other parts of my life now and that's the reason for this post's tittle. It's kind of funny, I dropped out of college few years ago but now I'm taking a GTO course online and will be taking GTO2 after I complete that and then I plan on taking some sort of advanced statistics type class. I do enjoy being able to take whatever course I'm interested in and learning what I want instead of being forced to take pointless classes that are a waste of my time.
With that being said, in the previous post I kind of brought up a few different topics, points, and never really got into them in detail. So my biggest reason for not writing that much or frequently lately is because I don't find myself to be a very good writer. I don't think I'm very good at expressing all of my thoughts in an organized and clear fashion that's enjoyable to the reader, yet here we are. The reason I'm writing now is actually because I have realized that I don't have to be the best writer to offer what I would consider interesting thoughts and opinions on topics to people that still do read this :f_love:. (Hi :f_drink:). And I do think a lot of times I do offer bits of valuable information or advice even.
The ahhh moment, I will tell you about now and this post will make more sense and how it has influenced me. What I have learned lately is something I have always knew but just didn't know how to approach it. So without keeping any more suspense, basically it's that you can be very happy with your progress while not getting complacent and still continuing to improve. Lately, I have been receiving more and more compliments about "oh you are so young and so successful already, etc etc" And each time my response was kind of lol I'm not successful and I never genuinely accepted the compliment. You might be thinking I'm crazy, and you are probably right. But the reason I couldn't accept them before is because I was never truly happy with what I have achieved before, I would always compare myself to someone more successful and think that what I have achieved is not worthy of compliments. However, that line of thought is very dangerous and there is truly no balance in it. When you get so caught up and so obsessed on a certain goal and self improvement, it's very easy to fall into the trap of no self acceptance and lack of confidence in yourself. I'm now able to look at the people admire, steal some of their ideas, some of the tactics they are using in their life, be happy for them and just be able to be happy with my own life as well. Note how I don't ever bring up jealousy or negative thoughts, I do truly try my best to have positive energy and it does make me feel good to see others succeed and it's partially a big reason for me having a long term student right now.
Energy Allocation
I'm kind of in a rhythm right now and feel in the zone with this blog post. I think everything I have said so far really ties in nicely into the next concept, if you can call it that, energy allocation. Obviously having general thoughts and ideas on something is great but it's a whole other animal to implement it and to implement it well at that. I would like to share how I attempt to implement the things I have talked about in my posts and the struggles I have with them and also the things I do well. I'm also going to talk a little about my theory on energy allocation. I have seen people talk about schedules and planning your day, but I have never seen people talk about energy allocation within a schedule. It's something I have came up with on my own, just adding that note in there because I usually learn stuff from listening to videos, audio books, or even reading certain articles.
“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!”
― Benjamin Franklin.
I think at this point, there is no surprise that even in planning there is a balance. My whole post is talking about balance, so yea sorry for repeating myself but I think it's important. My theory goes something like this, basically you have your year, 4 seasons, month, week, day, hours and it keep's getting smaller. I believe that if you took any of those segments and divided them up into small units, you would have different energy levels ranging from 1 (being the lowest) to 10 (being the highest). 1 - would basically mean you are not able to get anything done, 10 - would mean very focused, very productive etc. And also you are kind of like a "battery" in a sense that you kind of charge up to 100% and as the day goes on you slowly run out of juice and need to recharge again (aka sleep). Everyone has different activities they are interested in and also how much priority that has in their life. So basically, you would figure out which takes more priority and how much energy you would allocate to that activity during each segment. And also you would have short term goals, mid term goals, and long term goals, I think it's very important to have those short term goals and achieve them constantly just because the way our brain is wired and it just kind of helps to get positive reinforcement and gain confidence from an accomplishment. All at the same time you have something to aim towards.
How you allocate your energy and priority is totally up to you and I won't share how I go about it, but let me illustrate an example if what I'm talking about is not clear. Let's take two very basic activities, grinding poker (working) and hanging out with friends (fun) and a large segment of a year and divide it into 4 seasons. So for me personally, most of my friends and myself are not super into winter activities so I already know that during the winter I'm probably going to spend a large time hibernating inside and just mostly grinding poker. Then when the summer comes around, my friends will want to hang out more and do more activities. So if you have been following, it's pretty obvious that for me a lot of my energy during the winter goes towards playing poker so if my total goal is to get x amount of hands for the year, then I would achieve a large portion of that goal during the winter, it's not a linear breakdown between each month. With all of that being said, I would advise you guys that have read this and find it interesting, to spend a little time and try to think about how you want to allocate your energy. I used an example for a year, but you could even take it as small as a day and certainly more activities, each day there are certain things I would like to get done and at certain points of the day I will have less energy than others and activities all have different levels of priority to me.
I do try to think about all of these things but at the end of the day, if you do nothing but plan and think about how you are going to achieve things and never take any action that's certainly not within that balance we have been talking about it. Think about it, have some idea/plan, but don't stress about it and just do whatever feels right in the moment. That basically for me leads to a much happier life.
Everything is going well on this end, I'm currently attempting a little challenge of 1k to 101k on a site in poker, playing daily fantasy and try to make $ from that as well, studying a ton, coaching some and trying to lead a fun life. I will get more into all of this in the next post and also I have an idea to talk about long term ev vs short term ev and the power of networking. So yea, I think I will wrap this up on that note.
Until next time,
Serverm07.
I have been meaning to update my blog for a while, on a few occasions I had some pretty cool thoughts in my head and then I would be thinking in my head oh this sounds great and I feel like I know exactly what I'm going to write and then when I sit down to write, all of my "organized" thoughts are randomly vanished and I just find myself all over the place and decide to not even write it. And also a dilemma of "am I writing this for myself or for potential readers, does anyone care? It's funny because I have seen more than one other person write that exact same thing in their blog so it makes feel a little better. Anyways let's get into the juicy details, updates and thoughts I have had lately. 
