Quote:
Originally Posted by TheTyman9
Enjoying the podcasts a lot. The end of this last one definitely resonated a lot with my current thoughts and feelings on poker also. It's weird because sometimes the passion for poker still feels like it's there. It'll show up for a bit here and there and overall I do still like poker and am happier playing than I would be working most other jobs. Tbh I think it's just sort of inevitable though. You, me, and many others have been playing so much nlhe over the last decade of our lives and it's just bound to become less enjoyable over time. On top of that the stress of the variance and swings and it is understandably draining over a long period of time. I think you are smart for trying to figure out additional avenues of things you can monetize though to allow you to break free from poker a bit. I've mostly been 100% poker but imo poker works best part time in conjunction with some other part time income producer. Tricky part is finding another part time thing that actually pays anywhere near as well as poker does.
Thanks man, I somehow missed this when I was recording, will cover it in the episode I record today but it wont come out for a couple weeks so I wanted to respond quickly here as well.
The bolded part of your post sums it up perfectly. Every once in a while there is a glimmer of poker passion and overall it feels better than most jobs but its still super draining after a certain amount of time.
Until my recent job and other projects I'm trying I have been essentially 100% poker also. I agree that poker is better as one of multiple income streams, but I also agree that its hard to find anything part time that pays as well as poker. In the past I would usually abandon anything that didn't seem like it would be able to replace poker or be a viable sole source of income reasonably quickly. However, lately I'm finding it extremely valuable to have money coming in from other sources even if its only a fraction of my expenses at first and even if it takes more time that it would take to make the same amount at poker. Even those small amounts of money from other sources can reduce the stress of poker pretty significantly. And even if I spend say, 20 hours on poker and 20 hours on the side projects to make the same that I would make in 30 hours of poker, somehow the latter seems more manageable than the former, probably because there is some more variation in my weekly tasks.
Another consideration is that from what I've gathered, most things take a lot longer to come to fruition than poker. So dismissing something because my hourly is initially going to be less than poker is shortsighted since for a lot of things you have to stick it out for a while making a less than poker to eventually be able to make more, sometimes much more. I've made this mistake a ton and am trying my best to go after side projects without comparing the initial hourly to poker and instead looking at the long term viability of the project combined with how interested I am in doing it to asses whether it is worth doing.
That's my two cents. Obviously you have to consider the financial aspect when assessing new projects, but the hourly rate compared to poker right off the bat isn't the be-all end-all criteria.