The Secret of Success

What separates the successful from the unsuccessful? A lot of my friends play online poker—smart kids, kids with more than enough talent to go to the top. The question is: why don’t they?
Poker, despite the large element of luck, is a game of skill. Unlike basketball or football you don’t have to be born seven feet tall or anything else. Other than, perhaps, a basic intelligence requirement, pretty much anyone could be the best if they really wanted to …Or could they?
That’s a loaded phrase: “if they really wanted to.” I have friends that play 12+ hours a day and still can’t put together a bankroll. Do they just “not want to” enough?
They don’t have the skills—at least not yet. And frankly, fifteen years of experience is gonna tweak their game not overhaul it. They’ll never make it to the World Series of Poker—at least not like this. Hence, the elusive “X Factor” – what separates the pros from the amateurs? Experience? Luck? Determination? Or do they just think differently?
I tend to lean towards the latter of the options. The existence of prodigies indicates that it’s the correct answer. If someone with virtually no experience can sit down and play a game like a master it’s because the way they think about the game is entirely different from how most people do. The question becomes how do regular people learn to think like this?
First of all, there can be no debate that it’s possible to learn their mode of thought. Literate men can be taught everything from the theory of relativity to how to play baseball. However the real challenge would be engineering the theory yourself if nobody has invented it yet. So how do you do this?
I tend to think it’s a matter of thinking about the subject at hand as much as possible: every angle—every perspective—every detail. The subject should never leave your mind. To quote Forrest Gump (the ping-pong prodigy), “I played ping pong so much I even played it in my sleep.”
If you‘re always thinking about your subject, soon you start to see everything in terms of it. Pedestrians crossing the street became bouncing ping pong balls, dollars bills become poker hands. By the time you actually sit down to pursue your sport, you know it inside-out, upside-down and backwards. You see everything and then it becomes easy. Great ones always make their actions look effortless because to them, it is.
I end this post with a story about famed violinist Fritz Kreisler that I think shows the difference between the people that do succeed and the people that just want to. After a concert, a woman rushed up to Kreisler and said, “I would give my life to play as beautifully as you did.” Kreisler responded, “I did.”