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5 Famous Business Quotes That Also Apply To Poker Players

I’ll admit it – I’m a sucker for a motivational quote. You know the kind of thing, those little sparks of genius from the great leaders and thinkers of our time. My all-time favorite quote is from Henry T Ford, it goes like this: ‘Whether you think you can, whether you think you can’t, you’re right’. How many people do you know who will end up doing nothing much with their lives simply because society has poisoned them with limiting beliefs??

Anyway, back to poker.

I could easily have found 10 or more quotes here, it is just that the concepts would start to repeat themselves.

5 Business Quotes Which Directly Apply To Poker Players

#1 – Find A Job You Love And You’ll Never Do A Day’s Work In Your Life – Confucius

An oldy, but a goody. I know many people who are happy, or at least reasonably satisfied, with their jobs. On the other hand at least half of the people I know really don’t look forward to Monday mornings at all!

There is a word of warning here. Though many people love playing poker for a couple of years, it can turn into a chore after a while… If you are going to continue to ‘love your work’ of grinding, then you’ll need some way of keeping things fresh or at the very least ensuring that you have a great work-life balance.

#2 – I have not failed, I just found 10,000 ways that won’t work – Edison

Inventor of the light bulb Edison was one persistent guy, and we have a lot of modern day conveniences to thank him for. The message for poker players is a little different here. In Edison’s case there was nothing that came before to guide him. In the case of poker, you do not need to go through 10,000 mistakes before you become a good player. Instead you can use the huge number of resources out there to learn from the 10,000 trials of other people. I’m talking books, videos, websites and forums where people discuss hand histories, hey even my own SNG Blueprint course… You’ll be able to find ways that do work, and use them instead.

#3 - Work like there is someone working twenty-four hours a day to take it all away from you... – Mark Cuban

Billionaire and owner of the Dallas Cowboys is an inspirational guy in many ways. I love this quote, and generations of poker players have found out to their cost that there are people working to take their success away. Poker is an arms-race, you need to be working on your strategy all the time, on new ideas, finding new edges – if you are not working on this then, like Mark says, it is going to get taken away from you.

#4 – Twenty years from now you’ll be more disappointed by the things you did not do than by the ones you did – Mark Twain

No, I am not favoring ‘Mark’s’ here, it’s just a coincidence! How many chances are there from your past that you could have taken and now regret. For me there are many. Mostly small things, ‘what if I’d asked out XZY?’ (fill in the name of a couple of lovely ladies!), what if I had transferred my career to department X?

The relation to poker here is all about taking a shot… Oh, you are going to play it safe and keep battling 10,000 opponents hoping your big break with come from winning the $4 game? Well… good luck with that!

Go on, shift to a new site, grab a nice welcome bonus, and take a shot at the bigger games!

#5 – Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs – Henry T Ford

I’ll end with my second favorite Henry T Ford quote. This one relates to poker really well for me. The nebulous ‘move up to the $X’ can seem daunting or far away when beats are raining down on you and your bankroll struggling to gain momentum.

Break it down into smaller tasks, and life becomes much easier. These can be as working out how a couple of your regular opponents play drawing hands, color coding fish / new players in your games, learning a little more math each day, posting a daily hand on a popular forum… the list goes on.

Actually I there is one more quote which I love more than any others. It is not a business one, or for that matter particularly a motivational one. It remains my favorite thanks to the warm humor, the insight into the human heart and  the crazy imagination of its author – novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules, and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

(RIP Kurt!)

Best of luck at the tables, Mark

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