The mental game of poker

What Hacker News says

1. brigadier132Jul 2024
   It's effortless because my actions are aligned with my goals and desires. I used to be very addicted to poker. There was a book I read during that time called "The Mental Game of Poker" that is really good and broadly applicable to life. One of the lessons is to figure out your subconsciously held goals that are negatively impacting your consciously held goals.

   For example, someone's stated goal may be to build an amazing startup or open source project. But they constantly find themselves going to founder meetups and conventions, staying up very late and drinking a lot. They may also find themselves posting a lot on social media instead of working on building their thing. I would claim that this person has a hidden goal of seeking attention and fame. They likely would never tell themselves this and this is why self honesty is important. Once you are able to bring these hidden goals to the foreground it's actually easy to manage them. Wanting to be famous and get attention is a pretty ridiculous / base desire.

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2. partitionedMay 2024
   The Mental Game of Poker
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3. waprinMar 2024
   I completely agree with the sentiment, and as someone who’s mostly focused on a startup for pro poker players to study game theory more effectively (https://www.livepokertheory.com) , I find countless parallels between poker and entrepreneurship.

   Also, people don’t realize that startups aren’t one single event. There’s a million events and each one has its own luck. For example, you make a piece of content marketing there’s luck in whether it performs well, but that luck can be managed and the risk spread across many events by doing lots of small pieces of content marketing.

   I also wrote a blog post about how a popular psychology book oriented towards poker pros (The Mental Game of Poker) can be easily reframed for entrepreneurs:

   https://writing.billprin.com/p/the-mental-game-of-entreprene...

   With all that said, it’s highly ironic you picked Moneymaker as your example poker pro, since he’s famous in the poker world for being a very bad amateur player who got extremely lucky at the perfect time . It’s a bit like talking about the importance of hard work and deep technology skills for founders, and using Adam Neumann and WeWork as your example of that.

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