Achieving your goals, aspirations, and dreams can be challenging. You may reach a point where you start to wonder if the large amount of time and energy you’re investing into trading, poker, or golf is worth it. The path has not been as easy as you had hoped and, if you’re not yet hitting the levels of success and profitability you want, you may question the value of continuing.
The purpose of this blog is not to help you make a decision whether or not to continue. Frankly, there’s value in this blog even if you’re just starting out or already successful, because I want to challenge you to see the situation differently.
It’s easy to get swept up in the idea that it’s only worth spending so much time if you “realize your potential” and have monetary success, or the success you envision.
However, when you reach a stage where the game gets harder, an opportunity emerges that often goes unnoticed and can guarantee that your time will, to some degree, have been worth it – regardless of what you achieve. Knowing that your efforts will not have been wasted can reduce a lot of strain at a point when you could use a lighter load.
The general idea of personal improvement can be large, hard to define, and the feedback loop is quite long. One of the reasons I love working in these performance areas is they give you a contained learning environment, where you get clearer feedback than you often do in everyday life, or in your personal life.
If, for instance, you want to be a better partner, you might only have 3-4 arguments a year where your learnings will be put to the test, whereas in poker, trading, or golf, you’re tested every time you enter the arena – you’re constantly given the chance to build skill.
When trading, poker, or golf get hard, use it to cross-train for improvement in other areas of your life. If you’re struggling in multiple ways, this perspective can give you a bit of light in the darkness – a way of seeing the potential benefits more broadly and beyond what’s right in front of you.
By strengthening critical skills, gaining experience, and developing knowledge, you can bring them to other aspects of your life. I often hear from clients who talk about how working on their mental game has helped them deal with their emotions better, improve their relationships, deepen their love for hobbies, become better parents, and more.
Yes, your primary focus is success in your chosen arena, but you can have both without expending much extra effort. Here are a few examples:
- Work Ethic: This is the most challenging thing you’ve faced. Whether or not you’ve had a strong work ethic before, you’ll become stronger at persevering, staying consistent, and doing the necessary work.
- Improve Learning: Learning is at the heart of improvement. If you can be more efficient in learning, you’ll be more efficient in developing your skills and raising up your performance.
- Identify & Resolve Emotions: Emotional awareness, analysis, control, and resolution are key skills in any endeavor. Developing the ability to work through and correct the issues affecting you, gives you a leg up.
- Dissect & Analyze Problems: Finding the root cause of your emotions trains you to solve any technical problem from this perspective, giving you a sustainable foundation of growth.
- Understand Luck/Variance: People typically underestimate the role of variance in business and life. Having a clearer picture of it helps you understand what you control and what you can’t, which stabilizes confidence.
Effectively, what are often defined as soft skills become hard assets you can leverage beyond poker, trading, or golf. These are just a few examples of the many that you can develop.
This is especially helpful for those of you who may have taken a break from a more traditional work environment to build your trading or poker career and worry about holes in your resume. Being able to more clearly define these independent skills can make you better at “selling” that experience if you were to need to get a new job. Want to convince someone else that the time spent was valuable? First, prove it to yourself.
At the end of the day, when you have a guarantee like this, when you see the bigger picture beyond the tangible results – the money, the lower handicap – you’ll deepen the value you derive from your effort whether you succeed or fail in reaching your goals.
Plus, removing this layer of anxiety, stress, or pressure, can make your emotions more stable, leading to more consistent performance and the tangible results you are chasing. This could be the shift you need to help you breakthrough and reach the level of success you envision.
And, if you get to be a better person and have more success elsewhere, you can truly have your cake and eat it too!
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