Life lessons from poker: Embrace variance, ditch certainty

We talk about a lot of issues on The Ron and Don Show. Most of the time we try to come up with possible solutions and not just browbeat people that think differently than us. It dawned on me recently that a common denominator to many of the problems we talk about is a drive for certainty and security.

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Affordable housing. People want to be certain that they can afford to live where they want.

“Build the wall!” People want to be certain that we keep the bad guys out.

Don’t take my guns! People want to be certain that they will always be safe.

You get my point. At the root of most issues people protest about is a fear of uncertainty.

Here’s the kicker though: absolute certainty is an illusion. It doesn’t exist. At least not for everyday issues and problems. One of the most difficult and most rewarding things that I’ve been working on is to embrace variance in life. It’s really hard to do.

Almost everyone underestimates just how much randomness plays a role in our lives. We actually control very little, except for our own decisions.

Variance

My biggest teacher about variance has been my journey in the world of poker. It’s a decision-making game with imperfect information. That makes it the perfect stand-in for life. In fact, many of the biggest artificial intelligence studies at universities around the world use poker as their analog to teach a computer how to think. Why? Because of variance.

You can make all the right decisions and play a hand perfectly and still lose. It’s painful. It sucks in the moment, and it can be expensive. Just like real life. You feel most of the emotions of real life too – anger, disappointment, elation, joy, and pain.

The skill that poker teaches you is to go back and look at your decision-making process and ask yourself if there was a mistake in your process, not your result. The logic is that if you make great decisions over and over that eventually the results will follow. The best players in the world get to a point where the result doesn’t even matter. It’s all about making the right decision and then you let the cards fall where they may.

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This process-oriented thinking offers a way to turn these problems on their heads and stop chasing the wrong thing. Instead of pursuing absolute certainty, you pursue the best decision. Most of the time, if you’ve done it right, it will go your way. But there will be many times where you do everything right and you still lose.

The quicker you can accept that variance is just a part of life and keep moving, the happier you’ll be.

You can hear “What are we talking about here?” everyday at 4:45 p.m. on 97.3 FM.

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