How to defeat mediocrity: making stress work for you

Imagine any form of strenuous physical exercise. Lifting the heaviest weight you can, running your fastest possible 5k, sparring against the toughest fighter in the gym. You are trying to get through the last rep, the last hundred meters, the last 30 seconds of the last round. You are a full 10-out-of-10 on the effort scale.

Drenched in sweat, you hit the showers. You've earned yourself a nice cool shower and you start to feel better immediately. Now, depending on how well you manage your lifestyle, one of the following two scenarios result:

Scenario 1: Your lunch hour is almost over, and you've got a huge meeting with the boss. Or your wife is landing at the airport in ...oh shit, eight minutes! Time to cut the water, towel off, and still sweating, you throw on your clothes. You grab your gym bag (oops, forgot your water bottle), sprint to the car, and start speeding out of the parking lot. Two hours later, you're exhausted, but there's still lots of work to do, so you reach for another coffee or energy drink to get back to baseline.

Scenario 2: You take a long, cool shower for ten minutes. You towel off and have a smoothie at the juice bar. You take a 15-minute walk home, grab a quick power nap, then move on with the rest of your day.

Obviously, I think most people would prefer to be in Scenario 2.

Since our body always wants to be at a state of equilibrium, I've tended to look at health and wellness through this lens of equilibrium. One of the most important interplays in our body is that of the one between the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). The SNS is the "fight-or-flight mechanism" that engages the body for action. The PNS is the "rest and relax" part of your nervous system. The two systems ebb and flow like yin-and-yang. Neither is ever completely inactive, but throughout the course of the day, the two work together to keep the body in equilibrium.

Activities and experiences can either be sympathetic-dominant or parasympathetic-dominant as well. For example, contrast any of the following:

• intense hill sprints / a slow nature hike
• waking up in the morning / falling asleep at night
• an ice-cold shower / a warm bath
• daydreaming and fantasizing / executing and building
• rigourous studying / escapist pleasure reading
• deep tissue massage / gentle foam rolling
• intense intellectual thought / quiet meditation
• hunting for food / eating and digesting it

These pairs are not "opposites", and neither is one in the pair "better" than another; I simply wanted to show the types of activities that are SNS or PNS dominant. The only thing that is actually bad is too much of one and not enough of the other. Also, I didn't just list physical activities; in fact, for most people who aren't serious athletes, mental stressors (and factors such as diet and sleep) probably have the greatest nervous system impact.

Typically, you want to ramp stress up, and then ramp it back down into recovery. That's why people do warmups before the tough workout. It's also why I take a short walk outside in the morning before I do any heavy mental lifting, as well. When I'm done with the stressful task and it's time to put the weights (or the laptop) down, I wind down, grab a drink, and do something relaxing.

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Imagine that we had a way to determine, in real time, what a person's stress level was at any given moment. This guy is competing for a gold medal at the Olympics, he's at 10. This guy is delivering a career-defining presentation, he's at a 10. This guy is doing his usual morning workout, he's at a 7. This guy is getting a Swedish massage on the beach, he's at a 2.

What's useful is, of course, not the average or the sum of a person's stress level, but rather its distribution. Probably, most people in first-world countries are at a normal distribution:

(I should note that stress should not really be linearly evaluated in such a way, but I am treating it as linear to make a point here.)

Most people spend almost all their time in the middle. Their lives are fine. They get some exercise, but probably not enough. They get some sleep, but probably not enough. They are fairly good employees at work, but not superstars. They don't have financial troubles, but nor do they have great wealth. They watch a lot of TV and spend a lot of time on Facebook. They can also probably tell you a lot about the personal lives of their favourite celebrities and athletes. 

When they try things, they set low expectations. They half-ass a lot of different things, and are rarely too engaged in what they are doing. 

There's nothing wrong with these people, really. Society needs them, and luckily they are an abundant resource. They're just simply not serious achievers.

I don't want to be one of these people, either. You probably know some of these people. One could be your boss, your personal trainer, your teammate, your colleague. They might make a lot of money (or go broke gambling it all). Two hours after they leave the gym, they are reaching for another can of Monster or Red Bull just to get back to baseline. They are writing e-mails at 11:30pm and checking for responses at 5am. They certainly don't bother with meditation, or gentle stretching. Ain't got no time for that!

If they are professionals, they are running from one high-stress decision to another. If they are athletes, they are training multiple times a day to exhaustion (and never take days off). Sure, they might end up billionaire CEOs, Olympic gold medalists, or revolutionaries. Or they may drop dead of a heart attack. It's a coin flip.

Note that in spite of the fact that the huge majority of their lives are spent in the 7+ range, there is a big spike at the 1. That's because their lifestyles are so high-stress that they frequently get sick or injured, or get burned out, have nervous breakdowns, and so forth. At some point, their bodies have enough and shut them down. If you spend all of your life at the redline, don't be surprised when the engine blows up. 

Most of us don't know too many of these people. We probably don't know too many zen monks living in isolation on top of mountains. While these people might seem enlightened and happy, the vast majority of them probably aren't getting much done either.

In his fantastic book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that this approach is possibly even responsible for some of India's troubles:

"...the Indian fascination with advanced techniques for self-control, at the expense of learning to cope with the material challenges of the physical environment, has conspired to let impotence and apathy spread over a great proportion of the population, defeated by scarcity of resources and by overcrowding." 

This is what I'm looking for. As an athlete, I am trying to train hard, at high intensity, to improve in my sport. As a businessman, I am trying to work hard and think of creative solutions. As a student, I try to study with intent. As someone currently writing a blog post, I am trying to put aside distractions and focus on my words. But I also make sure to balance this with down time. I do some post-workout static stretching and quiet meditation. I eat well. I take naps, lots of them. I take caffeine in the morning, and magnesium at night.

You'll often hear people say (with pride), things like "I work hard and I play hard". This is great. But to this, we must add, "I rest hard". You might also hear someone (probably a millenial) describe him or herself as "pretty chill and laid-back". This person needs to add, "but I get shit done when I need to."

I am not putting myself out there to be better than anyone else. I often fail both at being too intense and being too lazy. I still spend more time at the 5s and 6s -- that wishy-washy level where you're not really doing anything useful, but not actually focused on recovering -- than I would like. But I put this out there as an ideal to strive for, not a goal to be reached.

Stress is not good, stress is not bad. Stress just is. It is a part of life and one that should be embraced as well as respected. One should not go through life trying to avoid stress, but rather actively managing it, and making it work for you.

If you want to be an achiever, then achieve. Work hard. Focus. Go all-in. But then, rest, recover, then do it again.

moving on - saying goodbye to Ultimate Poker

Well, the post title is pretty self-explanatory: I'm saying goodbye to Ultimate Gaming and stepping down as Director of Player Operations.

Over the past 15 months I've had the wonderful opportunity to help with the launching of the regulated online poker era in the United States. I've built the well-received Ultimate Poker Player Care team, something I'm tremendously proud of. In certain ways, I'm even more proud of this customer service team than the PokerStars one, because of all the various challenges and difficulties that UP's service team has faced.  I am very confident that their service will continue to be best-in-breed in US poker after my departure.

I've met some wonderful people throughout the organization, people with whom I hope to continue relationships. That's what's made it hard to say goodbye to them.

I'm not going to go into detail at this time regarding the reasons for my departure, other than to say the move is mostly a personal one and the departure is one that has been in the works for a while. I gave this company my 100% and now I want to take some time for myself personally and see what the next challenge for me should be. I've been taking a lot of thoughtful walks and thinking about would bring me fulfillment and joy in life. I'd really like to find the next thing that gets me up in the morning and excited about my day. I haven't quite figured it out yet, but I'm sure I'll be blogging about it when I do.

Thanks to everyone who has been so supportive in this venture. On to the next!

Crosspost: Going From Poker Pro To Poker Industry Pro

This is a crosspost from content I originally wrote as a two-parter for Ultimate Poker's content page, "The Rail".

Online poker had a tremendous effect on the lives of a number of young people throughout the 2000s. Prior to the last decade, to earn a high-income living as a young person, you needed to be a brilliant inventor or entrepreneur, an extremely talented and famous actor or singer, or maybe a professional athlete in a major sport. Obviously, this represented only a tiny percentage of the population of all young people.

But in the 2000s, with the first online poker boom, a great number of young people were suddenly able to earn high incomes playing online poker. Many intelligent young people put their university and college educations on hold or skipped them entirely because the allure of making far more money than any newly-minted graduate at an entry level position would make – and all by playing a game they loved.

Many of these young people would go on to become tremendously successful poker players and stars of the game. However, not everyone made it in the long run. Some players “burned out”, tiring of the online poker grind. Others saw the games they were playing in getting tougher and tougher as their opponents grew more educated, resulting in a major drop in income.

These players on the margins were now in a tough spot. The former pros found themselves in their mid or late 20s looking for work, but lacking both formal education and any significant traditional job experience.

The good news, if you’re one of these people, is that your experience playing hours of online poker, participating in forums, and generally being involved in the poker industry, makes you a valuable asset to online poker sites, including Ultimate Poker. At Ultimate Poker, we employ dozens of poker players in customer service, game room operations, product management, marketing and technology – all the way from entry level to senior executive.

Whether your poker industry experience ends up being as valuable as that engineering or law degree your parents wanted you to get will be a function of your own talent, skills, and attitude – but the point remains that you do offer relevant experience to companies like Ultimate Poker who are headquartered locally. 

Now I’d like to talk about how to get that job. The key thing to remember when entering the workforce is that despite your job or education gap, you bring value to poker companies! You provide skills and experience. The problem is, so do hundreds or even thousands of other poker pros who find themselves in a similar spot. How do you stand out from the crowd?

SOME DOS WHEN APPLYING FOR AN ONLINE POKER POSITION

Do include a cover letter, always. A customized cover letter is how the person reading your application (hiring manager or HR manager) knows that you spent the time to apply for position with this company and that you didn’t just spam the same resume to dozens of companies. It also should show you communicate effectively.

Do brag about what you know about poker. The cover letter is a good place for this. If you’ve played 2 million hands of poker on 10 different sites, you’re familiar with MTTs, SNGs, and cash games in hold’em, Omaha, stud and draw, brag about it here. While the hiring manager is probably not interested in how many final tables you made or what your lifetime BB/100 is, they certainly are interested in the breadth of your poker and gaming knowledge.

Do demonstrate your knowledge of the company. You should know a lot about the company that you’re applying for, whether it is low-level things like promotions and game features, or high-level items like jurisdictions and relationships with partners.

Do mention why you want to work for the company. A phrase that I absolutely love to see in a cover letter is “dream job”. More than any phrase on any cover letter, this makes me more likely to give a person an initial phone interview. Enthusiasm counts. Of course, you’ll have to be able to follow this up in both the phone and live interview, or you’ll be a big disappointment.

Do be specific about what job you want. “I’m really knowledgeable about poker in general, and I think I could fill a variety of roles in your organization.” I’ve seen this one many times, and honestly, I’d bet that it’s true most of the time. But you also have to realize that even in a new startup like Ultimate Gaming, applications are likely to be siphoned through a more traditional HR manager with a lot of corporate experience in more traditional brick-and-mortar based companies. So, even though you think you would be good at everything, you should indicate exactly what position you would like to have within the company. Gaming companies need people with all kinds of skills, from IT infrastructure to accounting to software development to customer service to marketing. While people with great general knowledge can bring value to any gaming or poker company, it’s the specialists who get noticed by HR.

And obviously, be realistic. If you are willing to work in an entry-level position but you say you’d be well suited as a Senior VP, well, it’s not very likely that the HR manager will consider you for that entry-level position.

AND NOW, THE DO NOTS.

Do not be quiet and demure in your interview. A lot of good poker players are real introverts. And while they are often intelligent, thoughtful and would make tremendous assets to any organization, it simply doesn’t come out in the interview. Your interviewer is not Phil Ivey staring you down for tells, so you shouldn’t be staring blankly, talking softly, and avoiding eye contact. Be engaging and demonstrate that you’re an individual with a personality, the kind of person that people want to have as a co-worker.

Do not hide any skeletons in your closet. In both Nevada and New Jersey, employees have been required to undergo background checks to work for Ultimate Gaming. While it is not always an absolute dealbreaker to have been previously convicted of a crime, it most likely is a dealbreaker if you aren’t immediately upfront about it. Additionally, the more senior the position in the company, the more likely that your background will be thoroughly investigated, so if you harbor hopes of one day being a senior executive in a gaming company, you’ll want to be honest from the get-go.

Do not misspell the name of the person you’re applying to. Seriously, this happens with alarming frequency. It’s not that I’m so egotistical I can’t handle having my name spelled incorrectly, but if I see it that way — after I’ve already corresponded with you — I’m going to be think that you’re not a detail-oriented person, and if you can get something like this wrong, you’ll probably get other things wrong too. I definitely don’t think that poor spelling is necessarily an indicator of lack of intelligence, but when there are potentially dozens or hundreds of people all applying for the same job, why stick out for all the wrong reasons?

There are plenty more dos and don’ts I could mention, but that would start to stray from the topic of how to go from poker player to poker industry into being a general “how to get a job” essay. But if you keep these points in mind, you’ll find yourself a lot more likely to land your desired position in your preferred company.

Until next time, best of luck – regardless of which side of the virtual felt you find yourself on.

"...and he was never heard from again."

That was the joke one of my exes, Jacqueline, used to make in a mock-ominous voice referring to individuals who had started playing World of Warcraft. The year was 2006 and she'd encountered an inordinate number of regular bloggers whose last blog posts began with, "so I signed up for World of Warcraft today" and correspondingly got sucked into the game so much that they were never heard from again (at least in the blogosphere).

Just as I have never tried crack or meth, I never touched WoW. But for the last month, I do feel like I've disappeared off the face of the earth. Sure, I've gone many long stretches without blogging, but this last month is the first time in my life I've been so immersed in work that I've had almost no interaction with the outside world. Many times over the last few weeks I've wanted to blog about how the working world has been treating me but the only thing I have time to do once I get home is work out (sometimes), cram a prepackaged dinner down my throat, and fall asleep. The only reason that tonight I have time to blog is that at this moment I'm on call, waiting for a co-worker who is on the road (it's 9:30pm) and could need my assistance online at any time.

Sadly, I haven't really been doing much in the way of MMA training. I make it to jiujitsu once or twice a week. I've hired a boxing trainer to give me private lessons twice a week. I've been trying to keep up general fitness and done a decent job of that. That's about it. Every time someone asks "when's your next fight?" I feel a little bit of life-tilt because there's no way I am in fight shape.

To be brutally honest, if I had known beforehand that this is what my life would be like, I might not have accepted the job. But despite the workload, I'm still glad I did. It's actually been fun in its own way. We have had a tremendously harried week here at Ultimate Poker, but the whole team has come together to support one another and get shit done. It's been nice to be a part of that. My stress level at times has been just through the roof and I have had my share of "omfg this is a disaster" freakouts, but there's definite life-ev in being part of a team.

I also like that I get to dabble in a little of everything in my work. I have had my hands in the technology, marketing, customer support, HR, and finance aspect of things. I definitely don't think I would have survived in a job where I was just doing one thing, and I hope the breadth of my work here at Ultimate Poker continues to increase.

But it is a crazy pace and hopefully things do settle down a bit soon, because I definitely don't think I will last long at the current pace. My hope is to set up and establish systems that largely run without me, so that I can get off the daily grind of burning the candle at both ends and instead work towards making a lasting long-term contribution to the organization. Not to mention getting back to fighting and playing poker.

A lot of people have been asking when we're going to start taking bets here at Ultimate Poker. While I'd love to go into detail, all I can say is that things are definitely getting exciting around here. We are continuing that push towards hand #1 of legal online poker and we really think we have what it takes to be the market winner in Nevada and beyond!