I wanted to be a poker player. I also wanted to be a soldier. I didn't know how to decide. Here's the process I used to move forward with my life 🧵 :

We start by logically analyzing the pros and cons of each decision, which is a fine strategy until we rack up a huge list of risk/rewards for both decisions and we're left with no better idea of how to actually come to a conclusion.

What most people do is assume that they haven't applied enough logical analysis to their situation to come to an objective conclusion.

"If only I had enough pros for me to feel comfortable making the right decision"

Let's break it down with simple logic: If decisions A and B were not close, we could analyze pros/cons and come to an objective conclusion. You wouldn't need to go further. The fact that you can't shows these decisions are very close and we need a different approach.

If the decisions are very close by objective measurements, then following this logic it doesn't actually matter which one we pick. What now matters is which decision we are in more emotional agreement with.

Hearing this will trigger anyone in the over-analytical archetype because it won't agree with their current system for parsing information. This is how I do it:

"How would committing to decision A make me feel?"
"How would committing to decision B make me feel?"
"Could I live with myself if I committed to decision A and not decision B"
"Could I live with myself if I committed to decision B and not decision A"

I was at a crossroads a while back. I wanted to join the Royal Marines for the last decade but knew that I had to pick between that and poker. I couldn't solve this logically; there were too many perks of both and I didn't know how to be ok with leaving one on the table.

I sat with the feeling of both on the table and tried to imagine both realities and what sacrifices would be required. I just wasn't prepared to commit to the military knowing that I would always have the possibility of really breaking through in poker on my mind.

Here's the conclusion I came to: Apply full commitment to poker for a decided timeframe (3 months). The only options were high-stakes success or total failure. This resonated with me because true failure would open me up to fully committing to the Marines.

In the span of those 3 months, I went from having moved down to 100NL to successfully beating 1kNL online. I never looked back and am happy with the path I have taken.

An interesting lesson I learnt: Once you reach emotional agreement on the decision, you automatically have 100% confidence you made the right decision because being in emotional agreement with the decision IS the way of measuring the best decision.

Summary:
· If decisions A and B are not close, you can easily identify the best decision with logic.
· If they are close, you need to adjust the lens through which you are trying to solve your problem.
· Which one "feels right"? Which one can you not live without?

Some Thoughts on Crossroads

If you have no routine and aren't on the path toward where you want to be, step 1 is to create a routine. If you have created your routine and you’re not sticking to it, then step 2 is to figure out what you’re doing wrong, and there can be a few reasons why:


1. Your routine has too much micromanagement

2. Your routine has too much friction

3. You haven’t clarified how the routine is driving you toward your goals

1. "Your routine has too much micromanagement"

A symptom of a common low-performance trait: The performance flip cycle. This performer goes through cycles of zero accountability, attempting to counter this by creating extreme structure.

This is rooted in an underlying lack of trust that you can sustain a healthy relationship with the goals you set yourself, and instead hope that a militant structure will override your lack of accountability.

Time blocking is a management system where you create “blocks” for your most important tasks instead of scheduling individual tasks down to the minute. You’re free to move these blocks around to fit unexpected changes in your schedule.

I have my weekly workout and poker playing schedule written down for the week, so each day I can refer to my planner to see where my fitness and poker blocks are for my day and execute my existing routine, which leads to the next point.

2. “Your routine has too much friction”

Automation lowers the friction involved in adhering to your schedule, making it easier to stick to your plan. Here’s a snapshot of my schedule on Notion:

For Poker, Fitness, Reading and Writing, I can click on each link that takes me to a sub-page with the specifics of my routine for that day. Let’s take a look at my “Fitness Protocol”:

I look at the current day and immediately know what I need to complete for the day. I also have sub-pages for protocols on every exercise. Investing some time up-front to create these time blocks creates minimal friction when it comes to executing your routine.

3. "You haven’t clarified how the routine is driving you toward your goals”

Your routine is a collection of repeated processes, each one of these processes designed to move you further towards specific goals you have set.

If you haven’t clarified your goals, then the processes you have put in place are unlikely to lead you toward your desired outcome.

A high-performance schedule should highlight short and long-term goals for each protocol you have in place, which should then be double-checked that the protocols align with furthering the goals.

By front-loading more time into the efficiency of your routine, you open up time to focus on being in execution mode every day and creating more time for the things you want to do.

To those who try to convince you that they work better without a fixed schedule: "How can you be so sure of this when you can’t get metrics for your productivity without a schedule?"

Here is the link to the Notion templates that I currently use by Jeff Su: https://www.jeffsu.org/notion-weekly-agenda-template/

And here is the link to the YouTube video where he shows how to navigate it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M28HPv1l8gY&

Some Thoughts on Routine Optimization

@GadzhiIman – 22 years old. Net worth of $25 Million.

@AlexHormozi – 33 years old. Net worth of $100 Million.

@MrBeast – 24 years old. Net worth of $56 Million.

What do all of these people have in common?

They’re all young and successful, probably a lot better than you in your given industry, but not 10,000x better. So how do they have 10,000x what most other guys hustling at their age have?

· Relentless work ethic

· High discipline

· Aggressively reinvesting in themselves

The first two points have been touched on by many people, but these don’t answer the question of how these entrepreneurs managed to scale exponentially faster than the competition, and why they’ve ended up with disproportionately more.

To understand this, we need to understand the value of compound interest and reinvesting. I’ve created a simple visual model to understand this:

Person X makes $4k/month - $1k expenses = $3k disposable income. Interest is based on 9.5% annual (S&P 500 over last 20 years).

Example 1: Saving nothing.

Save nothing, have nothing. This is your impulsive friend who lives paycheck to paycheck and wastes their money at the end of every month. Don’t be that friend.

Total: $0

Example 2: Saving $1k per month, no investment.

Saving a fixed amount of money monthly results in linear savings growth. A big difference between saving a % of your income and not saving at all.

Total: $121,000

Example 3: Saving $1k per month, with simple interest.

This illustrates how ineffective linear interest is. As you can see, we’re making a pitiful $950 more than without interest.

Total: $121,950

Example 4: Saving $1k per month, with compound interest.

We have now realized a 3.5x growth in our total investment, but we still haven;t made our millions. Alex Hormozi has said that passive investing is not what makes you rich, this is what he means by it.

Total: $202,996

Example 5: Saving $3k per month, with compound interest.

Imagine if we leveraged all of our disposable income, now we can start to see how important the size of our monthly contribution is to our end result.

Total: $608,989

Example 6: Saving 100% of disposable income with a 50% salary increase every 12 months.

Mr Beast reinvested all of the money he made after his videos to make his next one. He recognized that reinvestment was what would allow his videos to scale faster than any other YouTuber.

A 50% salary increase at the end of every year, combined with reinvesting 100% of your disposable income without scaling up your monthly expenditure, and compound interest on top of that? It started with a $3k investment and now… Total: $2,235,138

This is a financial model, but the concepts that we can take away extend further than personal investment. We can utilize this same model through the lens of scaling a business, or even self-improvement.

From this model, we can see that the two most important factors for determining the highest total are:

· Increasing your income and minimizing expenses (maximizing disposable income)

· Investing the maximum % of your disposable income

As a poker player, the best way to increase your income is to move up stakes, as every time you move up you’re playing for double the amount of money. The most common argument against this working is that the games get tougher and you can't maintain a strong winrate.

This is where reinvesting comes in.

You can reinvest your time into playing more volume to make more money, or to study more to increase your winrate. You can also reinvest your profits by leveraging coaches and study material.

You leverage money when it buys you a disproportionate amount of time back. Spending money to learn from a coach something that may take you 20 hours to learn independently, allows you to free that time up.

The game is an endless cycle of reinvesting and leverage, and the more reps we can put in, the higher we’ll scale.