Il update with some book recommendations later tonight, zen, stoicism, philsophy...etc that can be related to poker.

the "I am a champion" speech is insane.

this thread might be my best find on 2+2 ever

From the book 50th Law by Robert Greene and 50cent.

I thought this was an excellent piece in the book and wanted to share:

I recommend not to read Robert Greene, judging by his '48 Laws of Power' - his advice on manipulation is too mean. The best grain of advice I picked from him is that accepting gifts is -EV.

I can't digest the above quote. Solitude is awesome, bored loneliness isn't.

That said, I'm very monotonous in food choice... but I deem the need to eat an obstacle to life, not a potential source of entertainment.

My playlist is relatively constant too, but that's only because of laziness

Arnold Schwarzenegger - Six Secrets to Success

Arnie summed it up well but forgot rule 3a: don't be afraid to succeed. Some people like me have this fear and should dig deep to find out and fix the reasons for it.

Nassim Taleb - Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder is finally out

Recommended books:

Marcus Aurelius- meditations
Seneca- letters from a stoic
Allan watts- the way of zen ( he brought zen to the west, most knowledgeable westerner when it comes to buddishm)
Bagavad Gita
Dhammapada
Epictetus - discourses

Stoicism and Buddhism are the two best philosphies when it comes to poker

Spelling b/c on phone

Also naps us since u quoted Nietzsche you should read his thus spoke Zarathustra , it is easily my favorite book, and would even go as far as to say it is the greatest philosophical/piece of art to be created and ever will be created. Not so relevant for poker, but more so for inspiration on doing what you want in life and is very life affirming.

Nice. On christmas list.

luv u man

Sam Harris is the man. Keeping it almost too real. Hits so hard

^ Guy just falls through more pitfalls trying to get out the pitfall. His philosophy is just depressing and reversed. You can't not waste time. You can't have a perfect life. Thinking of these problems in your epiphany, just creates the problem of thinking about problems. it is not always now, ****ing ****** arrow of time ego crap.

PITY MEEEEEEEEEEE I WASN'T HAPPY IN SOME MOMENTS AND IN SOME MOMNENTS I WON@T BE HAPPEEEEE stfu seriously who the **** does he think he is preaching this bull****

edit: sorry for trolling your post but this **** angers me. There is a much simpler straight to the point route of getting to the truth without all this depression inducing thought. full of regret. I mean it comes to something when people start fearing that they might regret.

I really enjoyed both of the videos. Especially I liked that education thing, because it is something I've always had some issues with. Altho I'm not sure if the idea in it resolves anything at my part but it clearly shows that there is another way

I agree about the idea of education and school being 2 different things and alot of problems with the school system today. However I don't like his arguments. Listing 10 people who had no degree who had an impact on the world, and talking about how "if you don't build your dreams someone else will hire you to build theirs" makes it sound like thats what will happen if you go to school. It seems somewhat as he's advising

I believe the way we look at schooling in America (and the experiences I've had outside of it) are flawed. But unfortunately it is much harder to be successful (speaking only in financial sense of the term) without school. Yes it happens, but for everyone one of those people that "made it" how many thousands/hundreds of thousands didn't make it and how many end up in poverty and unable to support their family.


http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinso...reativity.html

I really like how this guy explains it. "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original"... "We are educating people out of their creative capacities"

Well that's high praise, thank you. That's my blog. Sometimes I wish I'd kept writing, but by and large I'm very happy with the end product, and think that I stopped before the quality started to deteriorate. (And yes, I ultimately did recover all of the older posts that I once thought that I'd accidentally nuked -- they're all in the blog archives.) Actually my BIGGEST regret is that Google Analytics didn't exist back then so I don't know what my readership actually was (outside of one of those old-school hit-counters that climbed past 250,000 at some point.) I used to get several emails a week from readers, and the Comments section was always pretty active, so my gorilla math tells me it was probably one of the better-read poker blogs out there for a time.

It's funny that the one post / concept you mention was what I called poker opportunity cost (POC)...because of all the things I wrote about over 4-5 years of blogging, that's the one that still to this day affects the prism through which I view the world, and funnily enough I've explained it to even my non-poker-playing friends with whom it all seems to resonate in different ways. The post is rather long, so I won't re-paste it in its entirety here but thanks for calling it out as one of the more influential ideas in your own evolution; I think it's pretty cool too.

Yhis is me in a nutshell, I havent read past this part of the thread yet so im hoping to see some good responses to this post.

Ps best of luck with the goals.

wow that was a sad man writing, i remember that like it was yesterday. luckily things are different now, although the procrastionation hasnt gone anywhere.

life update? how are things different now in Singapore? how's the poker been going? plans for the future?

after that post

-gf i started talking more seriously about moving to asia the following year and she started applying to doctoral programs.

-in february i found out that bank was offering severance packages for people willing to leave, but i wasn't on the secret list of people they wanted gone and in order to leave i had to be on that list; i made a plan to talk with my boss, suggest that they let me go and i will stay for 6 months to bring a new guy in and show him the ropes. it was risky because 1) they could have fired me on the spot 2) not let me go and leave me without bonuses. i talked with my boss and he couldnt have been more professional about it, so we agreed on the terms and i was thrilled.

-in august was my last working day, moved first my stuff to finland to my parents and in mid september to singapore where my gf had already been for a month and started her phd studies.

-spent time travelling in se asia with friends during the autumn, relaxing, reading, playing poker, watching nba and betting on the games.

-singapore is good, it's everything i hoped for except now i miss friends in europe more than ever, haven't really met anyone in singapore, not that i have made much effort either. i've been teaching the local kids a lot of basketball in the mornings at the local park, mostly 1on1 offence etc...it has been fun and there are sometimes up to 6 kids learning different moves and basics of shooting the ball.

-poker is going ok, i'm disappointed with my effort. i already reached high national levels in finland in two different domains, now i wanna do it with poker.

-future plans are open.....i wanna learn poker, but other skills too. looks like i'll be in singapore for 4 years. i wanna get rid of the anxious and annoying feelings that the 5 yrs in the bank gave me. big plan is never to have a boss anymore. also making a big effort to turn myself from a dreamer to a doer, "poker artisan" if you will.

btw i never intended to turn this into napsus' attention whoring or a personal blog. my apologies if that annoys someone. i'm doing this so that more people would share their stories as well. i'm tired of reading books and narratives about celebrity level people, that doesn't interest me. i'm much more interested reading about your guys' thoughts, lives and dreams, the real life....not the polished stories of wall street bankers or silicon valley nerds. so please post your stories and dreams if you want, i'd really appreciate it.

Guess I'll go ahead and post some stuff then xD

Currently in University, I'll x-post my thoughts about that from the RiO forums:

'So I am confused and conflicted about what I should do with re: university. On one hand, it seems very silly when I am at a decent university to go full board and attempt to be a professional poker player, it is not the sensible thing to do and I may regret it in the future if poker doesn't work out or if I want to get a family etc. On the other hand, I would love the freedom of being to travel where I want when I want, being my own boss and pritty much just doing whatever the **** I wanna do, when I wanna do it. I have many friends all over the world who are being professional poker players, and am incredibly jealous.

I am not really enjoying the course in the way that I enjoy playing poker and travelling/doing other things etc. It is somewhat fulfilling and challenging, but job wise, I really don't wanna get a job, unless it was for designing rockets and research into colonizing Mars at SpaceX or something similar (would hands down quit poker for good if I could get a job at this company) It is also very difficult to motivate myself from a financial perspective having experienced the swings of PLO. I think I am probably good enough that if I chose to be a professional poker player, and went full time, I could make it work. I am a first year at University, so I kinda wanna make the decision soon, so I don't invest time into half being a poker player, half being a student and dropping out after another few years. Would prefer to drop out or commit to it pritty soon, and if I commit to it that means significantly less time devoted to poker related things, as my course is very intense and requires a fair amount of study.

I am really, very, very tempted to drop out even though I'm enjoying myself somewhat in Bristol. I don't really like following the 'norm' and it would be an amazing amount of fun to live wherever I want and travel the world. If I ignored the responsible or expectation side of things, I would hand down become a poker player lol. I think the internet and economy/politics etc is such a way that for the foreseeable future poker is not going to become illegal for EU citizens and is gonna remain fairly profitable, despite any changes that may happen.

Please give your honest advice as to what I should do. I am a risk taker, and if it failed and I was without a degree and without money, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, as long as I'm still <25 years old lol. I am 19 atm btw. '

currently planning on finishing University, the social side is super fun, and the course is somewhat challenging if a bit tedious/boring at times when comparing it to other things I could be doing. I will probably give poker a shot and just travel the world, meet different people from different cultures etc. once I've finished University, would love the freedom to not be tied down and just go and do whatever I wanna do.

As far as job perspectives go, I would never want to, circumstances aside, get a job that was primarily for financial purposes, I would want to enjoy it and/or feel I was contributing to something important. I would love to work for Elon Musks company, SpaceX (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...sk-mars-colony), however currently you need a green card to work there so this option is not too realistic.

Really enjoying life atm, everythings fun and going well, just need to find a good balance of work, fun stuff and poker whilst at University, and then afterwards things should be a lot easier to do and plan out once I've gotten that out of the way, and I will hopefully have a better idea of what I wanna do with my life

I guess I'll post some of my own stuff then, too, because it is somewhat "related" to Olangotang's thoughts or so.

I'm a second year student at an university. Even if I've always been interested in computers and I'm studying things like programming now, I cannot even compare the difference in motivation between uni and poker. If I had played poker seriously more than a year, the choice for me would be to clear: drop out and play poker. Now that I'm only playing PLO25, I like to keep uni as a "Plan B". I think that is pretty responsible way to act (for me) even if I'm pursuing poker career much harder than university studies.

I have no clue how the situation will develop, though. I'm dreaming of climbing up to PLO100 during next year and that can be very damaging to my already-low study motivation. I guess that's why I made it a goal to survive with the studies as well. I think one of the possible solutions could be to slow down with studying when I reach certain level in poker and don't need government's support for studying anymore. Theoretically it'd be poker and studying switching the roles between "profession" and "hobby".

i think you should both keep studying and graduate. even though you have to read a predetermined set of books that you might never need in your life, the degree is still unfortunately something that many companies require from their employees. even if it would have very little relevance with the job.
so staying in school keeps your options wider, should poker go sour (busto, legislation nightmare, whatever)
the years in college will likely be the best years of your life....the parties, hanging out with friends, meeting new people all the time....things change a lot after you graduate. people find jobs, get married, move away, life just aint the same after that anymore, so enjoy the good times while they last.
i really dont buy the argument that you wont have time for poker. or then your university differs from mine completely. i remember studying, going out 2-3 nights per week, hanging out with friends and still having plenty of free time to do whatever.
a degree wont guarantee a good job, high salary or anything, but it keeps your options a lot wider.
dropping out from university to play plo25 is about the riskiest thing you can do.
also, poker life needs a good balance with something. so why not balance it with studies for now. you'll have plenty of time later on after you graduate to find out what **** to do besides poker, because it can get really boring really fast, especially at bad times.