Saturday, December 9th: Secret Superheroes

To first address a couple reader comments – one person suggested that I thank the readership of this blog, which was a bit of a kick in the butt, reminding me that if I haven’t made clear by this point how much I appreciate the audience and the consistent feedback, it’s merely a function of carelessness, and not ingratitude. I would have stopped writing long ago if it weren’t for the steady stream of emails and positive reinforcement that I’ve got from you guys, with many of you penning heartfelt emails and comments, which I’ve always done my best to respond to. While the blog may have started out as a purely personal project that provided me with an outlet for my own angst about my journey up the poker ladder, that benefit to me was long ago outstripped by the significance I think this thing has taken on to others as well. And although it may resonate as a purely selfish motive, the primary reason I’ve kept at this thing is…well, because I got the sense that it mattered to people, which was a feeling I’d never really experienced and which is pretty satisfying. So to ensure that I don’t forget to say so explicitly before the sun sets on this blog, the past year of posts has been fueled nearly exclusively by the interest of my readership, and I say “thanks”.

Second comment I saw was something that keeps popping up as a reaction to individuals who enjoy a certain degree of financial success playing poker, but who wonder what role it might play in a long-term career. To paraphrase the opinion in question, it’s something along the lines of “Listen, just build yourself a nice little nest-egg via poker, even if you’re not really digging it all that much at the moment, and then you’ll have the financial freedom to do what you really want in life.” It seems so intuitively appealing: bite the bullet now, and then you’ll be able to pursue your real passion. And it’s not a train of thought restricted only to poker…in fact, it’s probably invoked far more in the context of high-stress / high-income jobs in the financial and law sectors, where junior employees take home a nice paycheck but get worked to the bone. I present the following only for consideration, without passing judgment on the issue myself. I read a book a couple years ago by Po Bronson called What Should I Do With My Life. (Sidebar: You can download it as an e-book from Amazon. E-books are great little tools, which I really exploited at my old consulting job, and I encourage anyone with an office job that drags at times to do the same: buy e-books and read them at work. It’ll look like you’re actually reading something work-related if anyone walks by, and it really helps you “make time” for reading, if it’s one of your hobbies that you don’t find time for anymore.) Anyway, back to Po Bronson’s book: it was a pretty fascinating concept: the book was collection of a few dozen interviews with people who had done complete one-eighties in their professional life, abruptly giving up careers that they had prepared themselves for their entire lives for something they were truly passionate about. If I recall correctly, there was an interview with a high-powered financial executive who one day up and decided that he hated his job and wanted to start a salmon farm in the countryside. So he did. There was an interview with a med school graduate who, within weeks of her graduation, decided that she wanted no part of medicine and left to pursue something else. The thing is that they weren’t just a collection of “success stories”…a lot of the interviewees admitted that they often had a really tough go of it, and experienced significant self-doubt about whether they had made the right decision. But the book was one hell of an inspiring read: it was like a jolt of energy reminding me that I’m at all times in control of my own life, and changing any aspect of it is as easy as making a single decision.

Anyway, that’s enough background about the book…why do I bring it up here? Well, even though I read it 4 years ago, one thing has always stuck with me. Po Bronson says that he interviewed hundreds of people for the book, and you know how many of them had found success with the “nest egg” philosophy mentioned above (e.g. building up one’s bank account, and then pursuing one’s life passion.) Zero. Not a single one. Of all his interviewees who had dramatically changed their career path, not a single one said anything about the decision being made easier because of money they had accumulated from their previous, unfulfilling careers. The money was never cited as an enabling factor; rather, the interviewees by and large testify about an overwhelming belief that they were not following the pursuit for which they were meant, irrespective of their financial situation. Bronson cites that as the most surprising revelation of the entire process for him, and I found it pretty amazing as well. Because so many of us subscribe to that exact train of thought: who among us hasn’t gritted our teeth while carrying out some tedious task at a job we dislike, driven only by the conscious reminder that we’re making a few bucks that will one day allow us not to perform tasks such as that one. It’s related to something that I wrote a long, long time ago in this blog about how the popular interpretation of retirement as an incentive is just so maddeningly perverted: ‘I’ll work my butt off at job X so that one day down the road I won’t have to do X anymore.’ There’s an old (stupid) Yiddish joke about a guy coming across another man who’s repeatedly bashing his head against a brick wall, and he asks him “Why the heck are you doing that!??”, to which the man replies “Because it feels so good when I stop.” And yet Bronson feeds us this idea that based on his interviews, it just might be that this “nest egg” philosophy that we find so intuitively appealing might be a big fallacy subscribed to exclusively by people who don’t have the courage to take the scary and undefined steps required to pursue one’s life passion, at the expense of security. Anyway, I’ll just leave that hanging out there without taking sides, since it’s something I’m always reminded of whenever I hear the “Tough it out now, and then you’ll have the money to pursue what you want” philosophy espoused..

Here’s another quickie that’s neither here nor there, but which for me held a certain refreshing appeal as I try and decide what role poker is going to play in my life going forward. I was absent-mindedly perusing an online photo album belonging to a friend of mine who I’ve only hung out with a half-dozen times, and who struck me as friendly and outgoing, although perhaps unremarkable, when I came across a series of drawings from her sketchbook that simply blew my mind. Here’s one of them:

Don’t ask me why, but I’ve always been impressed to no end by artists…it’s just something that’s so foreign to my own set of abilities that those who possess the talent seem almost like magicians. Next time we talked, I think I gushed about how incredible her drawings were, and about I had no idea that she had that kind of talent (especially because it’s not what she went to school for, nor had she really pursued it professionally since.) She responded by saying something that I found pretty endearing: that she liked to think of herself as something of a superhero, and her artistic talent was like her secret super-power. And she even liked how well-hidden it was, because it made people all the more astounded (as was I) when they discover it. It reminded me of a mid-career guy I used to know at my consulting firm, who struck everyone as a bit of a weirdo (and with whom I had personally had a pretty serious confrontation about my work, although he wasn’t a bad guy…just completely socially inept.) Anyway, at some point we found out that he actually moonlighted as a concert violinist with a symphony in New York…I forget which one it was, but it was a pretty big deal in music circles. A bunch of us went to watch him perform, and it was incredible how seeing his “secret superpower” on display absolutely transformed him in the eyes of his peers, and almost overnight he went from being the office recluse to a guy that people really respected, even if he still struggled with social awkwardness. I’m not going to entertain a discussion about whether elite poker skill has the potential to “wow” people to the same extent as musical or artistic expertise (I think the short answer is that it doesn’t), but I found it to be a pretty neat little validation that it’s OK if one of your greatest skills doesn’t form the backbone of your professional career. It’s a lesson that’s so easy to forget, since every day we’re inundated with imagery of athletes, actors, and orators – in short, nearly anyone whose profession has a substantial presence in the public domain – who do exploit their chief talent as their principle life pursuit. But meeting these “secret superheroes” was a refreshing reminder that I may very well find career fulfillment with poker playing no more than a supporting role.